


use our memories (to light our way home)

by customrolex



Series: come home yesterday [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AU, Bucky Barnes as Captain America, Gen, Jewish Steve Rogers, M/M, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 00:08:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 102,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6588838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/customrolex/pseuds/customrolex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Steve held his gaze easily; Steve, who had been easier to speak to like the very first, clumsy iteration of an AI system than as a person when Tony had first brought him to New York, held his gaze without looking away or hesitating. Steve didn’t waver.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Tony realised he was seeing the man Bucky had fallen in love with once upon a time, the Steve he’d been then: a man who did the right thing even when it hurt, who knew right and wrong, who owned up to what he had to, and spoke honestly no matter the cost. Bucky had fallen for someone who could admit his mistakes, someone who carried guilt as heavily as he did, but who somehow still believed in humanity, who thought people would do the right thing, even if he had lived and died at the hands of those doing the worst of wrongs. Bucky had fallen in love with someone who believed in his humanity, no matter what Bucky did. Steve probably still believed in Howard’s.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. far beneath the waters

'How’s it going in here?' Bucky asked, dropping a cup of coffee he carried onto Tony’s favourite worktable. He didn’t look up because he was soldering the penultimate new receiver into Steve’s arm. Bruce had placed the improved nerve cappings in a few days ago; Tony was placing the new sensors in today. If everything went well, Steve would have a much wider range of feeling in his metal arm. The new nerve caps weren’t compatible with Cold War-era Soviet and Stark technology; Steve had been completely senseless in the arm since they’d began the procedure a few days ago. He hadn’t been up to the stress of maintenance all in one day, and Tony had just today gotten him to return to the workroom to finish. Tony had felt terrible, watching Steve struggle with his prosthesis without a real sense of proprioception or tactile feedback. He couldn’t wait till Steve was back in working order.

 

'He’s a champ,' Tony said absently, focussed intently on his task. This part wasn’t as important; he could replace the entirety of the chips and servomotors in the lower, all-mechanical section of the arm if he messed up, but Steve was visibly terrified in the surgical chair. He wouldn’t put Steve thru that unless he absolutely had to. Tony knew maintenance on the nerves had been painful. He and Bruce had tried their best to numb the area completely, but Steve’s metabolism worked quicker than they had thought so he still felt the tail end of the four hours they’d spent digging in his shoulder. Steve hadn’t said a word or moved a bit, but when they’d finally closed the access panel and looked up, he’d been pale and sweaty. He couldn’t, in any way, possibly feel what Tony was doing now, but Tony couldn’t help feeling the need to be as meticulous as if he were soldering inside someone’s flesh and blood arm. 

 

'Good,' Bucky said, rounding the chair and peering over Tony’s shoulder. His shadow fell right where Tony was working and he lifted his tools a centimetre immediately. 

 

'My light,' Tony prompted, and Bucky moved away with an apology. ''S all right,' Tony said. Steve looked up at Bucky, and Bucky probably saw more than Tony did in the mechanic gaze because he rounded the chair to pull to sit on a tall stool across from Tony, pulling it close and touching Steve’s arm with the backs of his fingers. Steve stayed quiet, staring at the point of contact. Tony might not have been able to read Steve’s face in times of stress, but Tony could read Bucky like a book. He was mostly worried, but he also looked a little proud. Pepper had looked the same way when Tony had woken up in recovery after his heart surgery.

 

He lifted his tools from the open panel of Steve’s arm. Steve’s head snapped to him. 

 

'Are you done?' he asked, the arm’s motors still off and the dead, metal weight leaving him unable to pull away like his body language clearly suggested he wanted to. 

 

'One more,' Tony said apologetically, picking up the final chip. Steve pushed a hard, short breath out of his nose and Tony felt immediately guilty. It wasn’t Steve’s intention—the new sensitivity would make small, normal tasks immeasurably easier for him (and Tony’s mind was dirty enough to know Steve would enjoy sex more with all his nerves firing on full)—but Tony couldn’t help the twinge of guilt nonetheless. 'Just a little one,' he offered. 'Very quick and then we’ll have your arm back in working order.' Steve looked away. Bucky slid his fingers down Steve’s other arm and threaded their fingers together. Tony wondered if the shifting, plated surface made the arm he was working on, as lifelike and responsive as it was (and as incredible as its feedback was about to be), a very distinct prosthetic. He wondered, somewhat empirically, if Steve could go to town in the shower—audition a hand puppet, or caulk the cracks of the tile, play one handed baseball with his metal fingers and palm—or if he would scrub his hair and his body with his right hand before ever so carefully cleaning the metal weapon attached to him, like a suit arm as fifth of his person. Tony figured he should also phrase the problem differently when he posed the absent wondering to Pepper. 

 

'Does it hurt?' Bucky asked, his thumb stroking the back of Steve’s palm. Steve shook his head.

 

'I just—system recalibration usually followed this type of maintenance,' Steve admitted. 

 

'No one is going to recalibrate you,' Tony promised, slotting the final chip into place. He reached up and pulled his light closer. 'The arm shouldn't even need adjusting; everything looks good. I’ll be done in, like, two minutes and you can walk right out of here, if you want.' He pushed his glasses back up his nose and leaned in again to work. 'Bucky likes hanging out in here; you’re welcome anytime, too.' 

 

'I don’t like it in here,' Steve said simply. Tony didn’t press him on that. Frankly, he didn’t blame the kid for being wary of unfamiliar technology. 

 

'You know, I want to make this arm, in a non-weaponized sense, available for other amputees, particularly veterans,' Tony said, finishing as quickly as he could. Steve looked over at him and Tony met his eyes for a second before looking back at his work. 'It’s the most advanced prosthesis I’ve ever seen; it would be a great thing for people who have lost limbs. Yours is built to withstand a lot more than the average person would need; a normal arm could be made out of lightweight materials. Wouldn’t need to be bulletproof, wouldn’t require much more anchoring than a shoulder replacement, anchoring in the humerus if the arm is only partially amputated.’ He shut up as he made the final touches. Steve huffed again in the silence. 

 

‘I think it’s a good idea,’ Bucky said, taking the conversation. ‘You're a veteran, after all. We should remind people of that. It's important that you served twice. I wouldn't have served once if I hadn't been drafted.’ 

 

'It is a good idea,' Steve agreed when he could. He didn't look at Tony. 'Let me know if I can help.' 

 

'I think upgrading this arm taught me what I needed to know,' Tony said, closing the access panel. 'If you don’t want, you don’t have to come back here until you need repairs.' 

 

'Are you done?' Steve asked. Tony chuckled, prompting another panel open. 

 

'Just gotta turn you back on,' he promised, reaching past wires to the disabling switch with a thin, long screwdriver. He activated the switch, and Steve’s fingers twitched involuntarily. Steve’s head snapped down at them, and Tony watched his face carefully. The arm had barely moved, and Steve didn't have the most expressive face Tony had ever seen, but he could see Steve absorbing the difference slowly, feeling and considering. Metal fingers flexed gently, and suddenly, Steve’s face cracked into an almost hesitant grin. The thin, white scars on his face, four neat lines marring the left side, bent against the strength of the smile. Steve dragged the back of his wrist on the chair’s arm as he pulled his prosthetic to his other hand, touching and feeling feedback in both limbs. 

 

'I can feel it,' he said, beaming up at Tony for only a second before his gaze fell vaguely to Tony’s elbow. ‘Thank you.’ His smile didn’t fade, for all he wouldn’t make eye contact. Tony smiled back, pushing his chair back a foot.

 

‘It’s nothing,’ Tony said. A glimmer of protest appeared in Steve’s eyes (Tony knew damn well restoring someone’s sense of touch was _something_ ). Steve clearly didn’t know how to vocalise the protest; his shoulders tensed and Tony’s own work light blinded him terribly as the plates on Steve’s arm nervously refolded themselves. Steve turned away, pulling his arm with him. 

 

Bucky's grin was bright and brilliant in response. 'Buck, I can feel it,' Steve told him, sounding positively entralled and terribly warm. Bucky lifted his hand from Steve’s flesh one, tangling their mismatched digits together. Steve laughed. 

 

It was the first time Tony had ever heard him laugh; it sounded nervous and a bit shaky. Stevesounded a little overwhelmed, Tony decided, because he pulled his hand free of Bucky's fingers to brush his newly sensitive palm over the circle of his own wrist, twisting like a sick bracelet. 

 

'Thank you, Tony,' Bucky said, smiling purely at Steve. ‘This isn’t nothing.’ Tony nodded Bucky’s thanks away as he pulled off his glasses to look at them without magnification. Tony remembered the stone-faced version of Bucky he had pulled out of SHIELD’s clutches, _the righteous man_ his stern father had preached about. He remembered the quiet, stoic captain who had then been a source of only amused hums, a soft two-beat chuckle, and polite smiles; Tony didn’t think Bucky had even known how sad of a figure he used to carve about the Tower and the city. The day Pepper made him laugh for the first time, his first real laugh in a new millennium, Bucky hadn’t remarked on it. Bucky hadn’t even known that for a brief second, there was a warmth in him but that it cooled too quickly and took weeks to show up again in another temporary splash. He hadn’t known he hadn’t been laughing. 

 

Tony didn't miss that version of Bucky. He liked the one that time had started to bring out; he liked, even more, the one that came home to New York after months in DC with Sam and those friends, a guy suddenly with a bit of light in his eyes and real motivation in the hugs he gave Pepper and started to give Tony. Tony loved Bucky now, as fiercely as he loved Rhodey, which made both men few and far between in Tony’s world. He was a popular guy, but these two people were exceptional to him. They’d become as instrumental to his life as Pepper was, as JARVIS was, and as his mother had been.

 

Tony wondered what his dad would have thought of the two of his friends together in a way which would have seen them discharged dishonourably. He wondered what his dad would have thought if the Winter Soldier had defected, been rescued and became Steve again while Dad were still alive to witness the wreckage he had caused, both to the world and his friend, to Steve. For that matter, Tony wondered what his dad would think of the carnage his association with HYDRA had left for his son to deal with. Tony had been trying very hard over the last few months not to think about it, but it was a bit harder when the prosthetic updates had him digging thru his father’s notes on the arm, when he’d improved the arm in the same way he had improved his father’s other weapons for so long. 

 

(There had been notes in the prosthetic files about the cryochamber, about the psychotropic drug implant still embedded but emptied in Steve’s skull. Tony had made improvements to those mechanisms too, without meaning to, just scratching out his father’s formulas and wiring diagrams and replacing them with his own as he read, correcting math and streamlining functions).

 

When Tony was a kid, all he had wanted was for his father to be proud of him. He didn’t know if his father would be proud of how Stark Industries had changed direction with no blue-collar job loss and only twelve weeks of factory downtime, or that many of their weapons engineers had been so loyal to the company as to begin working on green energy projects and biomedical tech rather than resign for other military pastures. He didn’t know if his dad would have been proud that his son was housing two men in love gladly and without care, or that Tony had taken down the same terrorist organization his father had worked for until they had him killed. 

 

What he did know is that he had been the one, today, to bring that bright and simple smile to Bucky’s face. He had been the one to make Steve laugh and stare at his palm in wonder. He was proud of himself, and he supposed that had to be enough. 

 

^^^

 

The noise was too much sometimes; no one minded much when Steve retreated, not even if he disappeared from the gathering and didn’t return. Sometimes it was too much. They had all seen different horrors, but Steve knew everyone understood why he didn’t always stay on the nights the whole of Bucky’s team descended on the Tower. Sometimes Steve went back to their balcony. He sat in the cold and thought about how it wouldn’t freeze him. He sat on the balcony and tried to think, about the trees he could spot in nearby parks and courtyards and playgrounds, of what the leaves meant. He tried to think of how long he had been home. 

 

The balcony door slid open and Steve’s head whipped around. A tall, broad blond man stood there, as tall as Bucky, filling up the entire doorway with his shoulders. Steve knew he’d been spotted but he froze where he sat nonetheless, feeling his legs curl up smaller. The man gave him a smile but Steve didn’t know the face behind the thick beard and couldn’t place the person in his memory. JARVIS wouldn’t let someone he didn’t know into the apartment, especially not with Bucky upstairs at the dinner party still.

 

‘Do you mind if I join you on your balcony?’ the man asked. Steve recognised the booming voice; relief flooded thru him when he realised it was only Thor. Steve looked back out over the city. He shook his head. He didn't mind Thor’s presence almost ever. Thor spoke poetically but honestly. Steve found him soothing. ‘It is a cool night, my friend,’ Thor announced, beaming as he took in the night skyline.

 

‘I think it’s summer soon,’ Steve offered. ‘I’m not very good with time anymore.’

 

‘Aye, the sun sets a little later each day,’ Thor agreed. ‘The seasons turn quicker here than on Asgard. Your sun must be smaller than ours, or perhaps your planet spins faster around it. Jane would know for sure.’ 

 

‘Who’s Jane?’ Steve asked. 

 

‘Jane Foster, a human I hold dearer than perhaps any other being I know,’ Thor reminded him. ‘You’ve met her on a few occasions. She is not present at many of our social gatherings, but she has yelled at Tony in front of you twice.’ 

 

‘I don’t remember,’ Steve admitted. He tried to think of someone yelling at Tony, but his mind pulled up broken, still images of Howard. He didn’t know how to to think of Jane and Tony when his brain was stuck on Tony and Howard. 

 

Thor turned from the skyline, smiling down at Steve where he had curled up against the edge of the wind sheltering, out of view of most of the sightlines available from the nearby tops of buildings. Steve was sure Thor didn’t mind Steve ignoring him to keep an eye on the ones that could still see him. ‘You have retired from our revels for the evening, I see.’ 

 

‘Sorry,’ Steve said. Thor waved off his apologies; something in his regal self-assurance comforted Steve beyond what he had expected when his sulking had been intruded upon. 

 

‘You have no need to apologise,’ Thor promised. ‘I see you are battle weary. Even the greatest of warriors sometimes make only a token presence at the feasts.’ 

 

‘I didn’t come from a battle,’ Steve said. ‘My war ended almost a century ago. Everything I’ve done since then has been murder.’ Thor considered this but seemed unconvinced. 

 

‘I confess I have not heard many stories of your battles from the good Captain,’ Thor said, ‘but I have heard enough to know your life has been as long and arduous as his while he would argue it more so. I see your wounds as easily as if they were mine, and the fact that they do not bleed does not make them less real.’ Steve sat with these words for a while, sweeping his eyes over the buildings around them.

 

‘You’re a real swell guy, you know that?’ Steve said eventually. Thor boomed a laugh. The sound of it made Steve look away from his sightlines, and it even brought a warm grin to his face. 

 

‘I make my efforts, little one,’ Thor replied. ‘I have heard that you and your people have a holiday coming soon.’ He offered Steve a bottle of beer Steve hadn’t noticed was tucked in his giant hand. He accepted it. Bucky didn’t get drunk easily anymore; he had to drink the same things Thor the Asgardian did. Steve’s tolerance for ingested poisons was still very low, just like his lungs were still very sensitive. He sobered far more quickly than he used to, but getting drunk was hardly a challenge. 

 

‘The holiday’s called Passover,’ Steve agreed after thanking Thor for the drink. ‘Sam’s not sure the state will extend my security curfew so I might not get to go to the Seder.’ 

 

‘It is a holiday for your gods? A celebration?’ Thor asked. He settled his giant frame on the balcony’s wicker couch. He sipped from his own little glass. 

 

‘I have one god, but yes,’ Steve said. ‘It’s a prayer service, a dinner, a time dedicated to eat and drink and talk about faith and remember things, people. Passover is an eight-day celebration to remember our ancestors, when they were released from slavery in Egypt. We do the same rituals they did then to celebrate the exodus. It’s a celebration of freedom.’ His eyes prickled a bit and he looked back out across the city. 

 

Steve didn’t know if he’d get to celebrate Passover with his shul. He’d only attended morning Shabbat services since he’d entered outpatient deprogramming, since he’d returned from being the Winter Soldier. The security escorts were required to have him back under JARVIS’s lockdown by five in the evening, but the Passover service didn’t start until sundown and the Seder would probably not end until well after midnight. It was his first Passover in the new millennium; he had wanted to relive and experience the true freedom the Israelites had. The irony that he wasn't allowed to was not lost on him. 

 

‘Your people were slaves? Like Sam’s people, here in America?’ Thor asked. 

 

‘My people’s slavery in Egypt was a very long time ago,’ Steve said. ‘Sam’s people’s wasn’t. I don’t—It’s hard for me to know, but it was less than a century ago when I was a person.’

 

‘I think you are a person now,’ Thor told him, almost firmly. ‘And a person of good faith at that. What does it mean to your people to have faith?’ he asked after a moment. Steve considered. 

 

‘We believe in God, a lotta us,’ Steve said. ‘I think He knows who I am. I think He hears me when I pray. My faith connects me to my family,’ Steve explained. ‘I mean, I never knew my father; he died when I was too young to know him, but he was a Catholic like Bucky, not a Jew like me. So it connects me to my mother, really, and the people she and I loved in Brooklyn. Our synagogue, the people who prayed for me when I was sick, the kids I studied Torah with, the people I grew up with. My family.’

 

‘A band of brothers!’ Thor agreed, encouraging him softly. Steve brought the bottle to his lips and let the bitter taste calm him. His hand was shaking interminably. He still felt frantic thinking of his mother. He couldn't think of her without remembering she died alone in a sanatorium; HYDRA’s warping of his brain had melded his imagining of her in a chipped white hospice bed with the racks to which he’d been pinned with cuffs and magnets and straps, because the unending seizures would otherwise have ripped his head from the neurosurgical frame. He could see them doing it to her. He could feel the screws in his temple as they dug in his head for his heart. He could see his mother dying as she coughed blood from her lungs. 

 

‘This I understand well, little friend,’ Thor went on, filling the silence kindly. Steve wondered if the god knew how helpful his assuring voice was. He wondered if Thor knew he was pulling Steve back to the present. ‘I wish them well in the holiday!’ Thor’s voice drowned out his mother’s screaming. Steve wanted to sob with relief. The servomotors in his forearm whined as they reset. 

 

‘My family’s gone,’ Steve admitted. His head stayed quiet. Thor bowed his head in sympathy. ‘But the traditions of my synagogue today, they’re the same things I learned as a kid, as our ancestors learned a millennium ago; I’m as connected to today as to my family by them. When I pray, I look inside myself for the magic part that makes me a person, the spark I think God gives us when we’re created or when we’re born, the spark that remembering puts there, and I ask questions. Sometimes, I find answers. 

 

'Sometimes, I find small things to carry with me that I think make me better and more rarely I put down things that are heavy and make me worse. The things that aren’t so bad to carry, I think they’re a gift from God. When He tells me to put something down, I’m thankful. When I love someone,’ Steve explained, ‘and I feel their soul reflect mine in the morning, or when I feel my soul offer theirs salvation from pain or—’ He supposed if he were being honest he should be honest, so he flushed red and said to Thor: ‘—when I get to give them or find in them salvation in pleasure, I think that it’s a gift from God too.

 

‘Because how could it not be?’ Steve finished. ‘Anyway, Passover is coming up. The Exodus. _Freedom_. I don’t think I’ll be able to go my synagogue’s service, or anyone’s Seder. I’ll celebrate here, with Bucky, maybe Tony and Pepper.’ He sipped the beer he’d been brought, thankful for it. ‘It’ll be nice.’ 

 

‘It should be unfavorable if you are prevented from attending the festival of freedom,’ Thor said. ‘It disturbs me, in fact, to imagine you missing it. You overcame great obstacles to obtain your freedom from the snakes of HYDRA.’ Steve wondered if Thor knew that was a pun. 

 

‘No, I understand why I’m under the restrictions I’m under,’ Steve told him. He shrugged. ‘Tonight, for example, where would I have gone if I were overwhelmed at the service? At the Seder? The normal services are much shorter than that night would be, and I'm better in the mornings anyway. After morning shul, I can come home, if, you know,’ he explained. ‘Outside—it’s loud outside. I’m—stay quiet but the noise still goes, but there are quiet spots here. It’s too loud otherwise.’ He wasn't making sense. He huffed, feeling his cheeks get hot and his warm fingers become restless. He was very careful not the shatter the beer he held. 

 

‘What if the celebration is too loud?’ Thor agreed, understanding easily. ‘I see your dilemma.’

 

‘I just don't want anyone to get hurt,’ Steve blurted. ‘I don't think I would hurt anyone but I understand why people are afraid. I don't think I can promise it'll be OK yet.’ 

 

‘The good Captain says you never lash out,’ Thor offered. 

 

‘I still lose time,’ Steve countered. ‘I can't remember a whole day again.’ He picked at the label with his nervous hand, scraping his nail along dark glass. It wasn't good enough to take someone's word that he was no longer programmed for violence; he wanted to know it himself. ‘They—the spark? The one that makes you a person? They tried to cut it out.’ He looked up at Thor, who held his gaze readily. Steve felt like his chest was made of air instead of stones, suddenly. 

 

‘I know,’ Thor promised. ‘It pains me to think. The men who caused your suffering were first powered by tales of me, of my family, who left before Midgard’s people could understand.’ 

 

‘The men who hurt me were powered by greed, or maybe fear,’ Steve corrected. ‘I was there a long time, and even when—he was the man with the red face—Bucky would know. He didn’t have a faith in you, or in your story. I don’t know what he thought but he wasn’t a person of faith. He wanted to rule the world and thought there was a power for the taking.’ 

 

‘It isn’t the same thing,’ Steve said. He frowned, sweeping the sightlines again. He didn’t know what they had been talking about before. 

 

‘Perhaps Jane and I shall attend your small celebration,’ the god announced, drawing Steve back to the present. He remembered Passover again; it was coming up. The trees were changing. He knew what the leaves meant; time was passing and he was here to see it. His hair was long; it had been a long time since someone had had to cut into his head. He was free. He had choices now, at least some. His hair was long so he knew time had passed. ‘She hasn’t been to one of your people’s holidays in some time, but if you wish, I will extend an invitation.’ Steve gave Thor a smile. 

 

‘That’d be nice,’ Steve said. ‘I’ll let you know if I’ll be here on lockdown.’ 

 

‘I look forward to finding out,’ Thor promised. They looked out together then, over the city at the lights and the distant, distant stars. Eventually, Thor offered Steve a hand. Steve took it, reaching just a little to meet Thor’s hand from his perch on the cement wind-sheltering. Steve kept his little hand in Thor’s big one, and the king loaned him enough strength to stay with their friends. 

 

^^^

 

'Hey,' Sam said, appearing in the foyer as Bucky stepped thru the sliding door. He spoke quietly, standing in blue-striped stocking-feet, like a cue. Bucky murmured his own hello just as softly. 

 

'He's asleep?' Bucky asked. 'Everything jake?' He put his attaché down without letting its heavy papers or his laptop bang against the bamboo hardwood. It struck Bucky, as always, that he had never seen bamboo grow in his life, that he could think of, yet he lived in a house with only tile and bamboo. He didn’t know if it were bizarre or a sign of his good fortune in the new millennium. 

 

'Yeah, ’s all good,' Sam said. 'Sorry about asking you to work downstairs when you got back from the Capitol tonight. It was just a bad day for him.’

 

'No, it’s fine,' Bucky lied, because he had gotten in from a two-day-one-night trip to DC missing Steve dearly.

 

'Still,' Sam said. 'I know it’s gotta be hard to be so close but not be able to do anything.' 

 

'I don’t like when he has days when I’m not the one who can help him,' Bucky admitted, rubbing his neck as he moved into the kitchen. Sam followed him quietly. JARVIS gave them dim, clear lighting for quiet conversation, and Bucky thanked him absently. He opened his cupboard and held up a loaf of bread. Sam nodded, pulling the fridge open to choose meats for them. 

 

'Can we eat this prosciutto or is it fancy?' Sam asked, in the casual manner someone adopted when they hoped to not be discovered to have been secretly coveting the item in question for some time. 

 

'It is fancy, but we can eat it; the butcher sent too much,' Bucky replied. 'Or Tony is lying and wanted to buy lots of fancy prosciutto for both the fundraising gala and his friends.' 

 

'Nice,' Sam said, pulling the prosciutto, a bag of spinach, and another bag of deli meats from the fridge. He passed them to Bucky before going back for mustard and mayonnaise.

 

'Hey, Sam, I’m sorry, you know, about all this,' Bucky said lamely as he accepted the mayo and mustard from Sam. Sam frowned at him. Bucky avoided his eyes by opening jars and pulling bread from its paper bag. 

 

'What do you mean?' Sam asked. He pointed at the beer in the door of the fridge. 'Can I have one of these?'

 

'Pass me one too, please. I’m sorry about all this,’ Bucky elaborated, waving his hand vaguely over the kitchen. He really meant the small circle of chaos in which he lived; he meant the mess that knowing Bucky had dragged Sam into. 'I’m glad the VA has you on the security team. It’s good for him to, you know, have you around, but I’m sorry you’ve been dragged out of your hometown, and you had to leave the group back home—' 

 

'I’m not your counsellor anymore, but remember when I said you had a guilt complex?' Sam asked, interrupting. Bucky started fixing food for them. 

 

'And I said I didn’t and Helene started laughing,' Bucky agreed. 

 

'That’s right; that is what happened,' Sam said, like he’d forgotten that part. He passed Bucky a beer, steadied, and said, 'Bucky, is there much about me that makes you think I can be dragged places?'

 

'No,’ Bucky admitted. Sam smirked as he sat down across the island from Bucky. He had a great smirk. Bucky didn’t know anyone else who could silently say I told you so while looking so damn honest. Steve used to have a temper and his I told you so’s had always come more as accusing glares and fuming. Peggy used to meet his eye over the map or the table and remind him in whispers teeming with various kinds of flirtation. She said it frankly from her bed now, giving no effort to couch the blow in her old age. 

 

'So you don’t need to apologize to me. You don’t need to feel guilty about me being here. I wasn’t dragged anywhere by your candy ass, that’s for damn sure,' Sam told him. 'There aren’t a lot of VA counsellors who have actually been to war and can still handle the type of violent escape the state’s worried about, or actually prevent it.' 

 

'Steve’s not gonna—' 

 

'That’s not my point and you know it,' Sam said. '’Cause my worst nightmare is that some crazy HYDRA fuck we don’t know about could come after him. Gotta be quicker to get him suited up again before he knows who he is than somehow to find another superhumanly strong person to brainwash, right? I figured the guards were needed, not for why they thought, but yeah, I thought he should have guards.'

 

'Christ,' Bucky cursed to himself, because that was still one of his nightmares too. Sam tugged a plate with two sandwiches on it towards himself before continuing on. 

 

'So when the state said, _you can let him out of hospital if he agrees to three armed escorts while in public,_ I saw where they were coming from,' Sam went on, ramping up. Bucky privately thanked God Pepper had known not to include him in those negotiations; he thanked God Pepper had been the one visiting Steve when he was at his worst, that she had been the one who coordinated his outpatient release, and that she was the one Steve had latched onto from that first night in Stark Tower. He was glad Steve and Pepper had known he couldn’t have had a level head about getting Steve out of those mint-green rooms at Melissa Nguyen’s CIA-adjunct deprogramming centre; he was glad they spared him the agony of worrying about that in addition to everything else. 'I _got_ why they wanted someone like him to be followed around by guards.'

 

'But I also knew this kid would need someone in his corner,' Sam said. 'I know the other escorts aren’t worrying about him, or about someone getting too close to him, and they don’t know how to read him. They don’t care how to read him. They don’t know what to do when he starts buggin' out; they don’t know how to pull him back in. There aren’t a lot of guys with qualifications for being in this particular kid’s corner.' 

 

Bucky never knew what to say to Sam when he got intense, especially when he was right. He missed group. Somebody else always knew what to say. 

 

'I’m not even sure it has anything to do with you, quite frankly,' Sam added, off-handedly, mostly to himself. 

 

'This kid?' Bucky echoed, challenging the only part he could. The rest of it warmed his heart; he was relieved Sam was stepping up for Steve like this. Whether Sam had the intention or not, Bucky felt like Sam had stepped up for him. Sam stopped him worrying too much when Steve went, rarely, out into public. Sam’s position on the security escort team eased his fear that the security team would end Steve if he had the kind of bad day the state feared; Sam’s first instinct wouldn’t be to shoot but to calm. Sam’s first instinct would be to get Steve home and keep him safe. 

 

'Biologically, I’m four years older than him,' Sam pointed out. 'I dug thru the online files and did the math. Yeah, I’m gonna keep an eye on him same as I would my own sibling.' Bucky nodded, closing the final sandwich. His throat felt tight, like forcing words thru would reveal how much that meant to him. Something in Sam’s expression told Bucky he could tell. Buck rescrewed jar lids but left them on the counter in case one of them needed more food or more condiments. He used to be hungry a lot as a kid because money was scarce, and hungry a lot during the war because of the serum, but hunger wasn’t a big part of his life anymore. He always had food now, always enough for his needs and those of his friends. 

 

'Look,' Sam said, after they’d chewed in amicable silence for a few minutes. 'I know he’s your partner, and I’m not your counsellor anymore, but you know that this whole thing… The road doesn’t end when he gets released from outpatient treatment. That’s when it starts.' 

 

'He’ll be home,' Bucky put in, disagreeing. 'He’ll be home for real: no more security staff in our apartment, no more escorts, no more public schedules. He’ll see Melissa on his terms, or someone else, even.' 

 

'Yep,' Sam agreed, in a tone which suggested he certainly did not. 'But the criminal aftermath is gonna start after the medical aftermath is over.' 

 

'He’s not a criminal,' Bucky said flatly. 

 

'No, I don’t think so either,' Sam agreed, in a tone which suggested he genuinely did. 'But I do think to prove that’s gonna take a judge.' 

 

'He was a _prisoner of war_ ,' Bucky snapped. 'They tortured him for years; they held him in ice for _decades_.'

 

'But they used him as a tool in their crimes,' Sam said. 'He was sometimes the only HYDRA operative who had any direct contact with the victim, the only one on the crime scene, the only person alive who could really know what happened. Bucky, there are people who spent their whole lives in jail for things HYDRA made him do; there are people—' 

 

'Shut up,' Bucky said weakly. 

 

'I’m serious,' Sam told him. 'He’s going to see the inside of a courtroom if only to prove what you and I and Melissa already know: that he didn’t want to kill anyone; they made him. You're going to have to realise that.'

 

'Sam—' 

 

'You’re gonna have to deal with your anger about it, too, because he’ll need you behind him in the courtroom, but we also can’t have you looking like you’re gonna take the prosecution’s head off.' 

 

'I know,' Bucky tried, trying to brush Sam off, stop this. Sam plowed onwards. 

 

‘I saw you working thru stuff in DC, and I see you working less now,' Sam said. 'Who are you talking to now?' Bucky sighed. He leaned his fists on the counter. Sam waited, patient and staring without weight.

 

'Nobody,' Bucky admitted. 'I don’t got time to talk. HYDRA is alive in dozens of independent cells, and every week in between missions makes them harder to root out. I don’t have the time to be falling apart anymore, Sam.' 

 

'Well, jeez, it sounds like you might want to try taking steps to prevent an even bigger breakdown,' Sam said sarcastically. Bucky sometimes missed the days when his formal relationship with Sam had spared him the brunt of his sarcasm and derision. 'You’re telling me there isn’t a VA here in New York that would have you? There isn’t somebody who coulda come sat with you while you worked, coulda talked to you tonight?' 

 

' _Sam_ , drop it, all right?' Bucky said. 'You’ve been heard out, all right? but I don’t—Just drop it.' 

 

'Fair enough,' Sam said. 'He’s worried about you too, man.' Bucky felt another sigh weighing on his chest. He left it out and picked up his sandwich again. 

 

'I’ll be all right eventually.' 

 

^^^

 

'Stevie,' Bucky whispered, slinging an arm along Steve’s collarbone from behind. Steve dropped his toothbrush into the cup and pushed off the faucet with his other hand, not unaware of Bucky's timing. Bucky smelled equally of Luckies, Crest toothpaste, and the otherworldly tang of what Steve thought tasted like Asgardian schnapps. He himself could handle a sip or two, but both Bucky and Thor could take full shots of it. 'Stevie, guess what?' Bucky pulled Steve flush against his front. 

 

Steve played a disapproving frown at Bucky in the mirror. He demanded, ‘are you drunk?’ He chastised with his tone. He could have waggled a finger. 

 

(Neither of them mentioned that Steve sometimes used Bucky as a tester for his relearning of human expressions. Bucky recognized their banter, of course, he did, but he now gave a grin and pressed a rewarding kiss into Steve’s neck and Steve returned a reward by tilting his jaw up for Bucky's lips. Bucky tucked Steve's hair behind his ear with a gentle finger, snagging little tangles and clearing the way for his lips.)

 

'Are you drunk?' Steve repeated, sincerely curious. Bucky giggled, the small noise loud as Bucky kissed Steve’s ear. 'You are,' Steve accused, twisting away from the tickle of Bucky’s shadowy stubble with a quiet laugh of his own. 

 

'Everyone gets drunk at Seder; you were drunker than me an hour ago,’ Bucky pointed out. ‘Thor’s Asgardian hooch really gets to me.’

 

‘Asgardian hooch probably isn’t kosher,’ Steve pointed out. He wasn’t seriously objecting, but he bet it were true. Bucky laughed. Steve let the noise light up his chest. 

 

‘Hey,’ Bucky whispered, pressing himself against Steve's back and holding him so fucking tenderly. That turned the light into warmth. ‘Can I ask you something?’ 

 

‘Yeah,’ Steve promised. Bucky nipped at his ear. Steve couldn't help but duck from it as his old trick knee shot him with a phantom shake at the sensual stimulation along old scars of Soviet neurosurgeries, or maybe Bucky's attention literally made Steve go weak in the knees. Bucky held him easily, his big arms tight around Steve. Steve thought he remembered being a candidate for Bucky’s serum; he couldn't imagine feeling safe if Bucky couldn't still dwarf him and envelop him and shield him like this. 

 

‘Would you ever convert?’ Bucky asked him. Steve hesitated. He became hyper aware of Bucky's arm against his metal shoulder. ‘If we were ever to get married, one of us would have to.’ He glanced up at Bucky and then leaned his neck in a request for affection. Bucky pressed his lips behind Steve’s ear. ‘I don’t feel like marriage is—It doesn’t feel like it’s an option anymore, at least for me, but I spent tonight wondering about it.’ 

 

‘You're a Catholic,’ Steve hedged, after a moment. ‘It's a word that means _everybody_ but it never felt that way when I went with you.’ 

 

‘I felt welcome at your synagogue,’ Bucky agreed. ‘And your rabbi never questioned me when he was called to your sickbed. But my family—’

 

‘I know,’ Steve agreed. ‘I couldn't convert either, even if the little differences didn't seem so big. Sometimes these prayers are all I have left of my mother, my friends from our time.’

 

‘It feels like it's mine in a way not a lot is,’ Bucky said. Steve hummed his agreement. He let his weight fall into Bucky almost completely, but Bucky didn’t even let him sway: held dear, safe. ‘I can only imagine how unique it is to have something that's yours, given what—’

 

‘Please don't,’ Steve complained. ‘Please: not when we're close like this.’ Bucky turned him then, placing Steve’s weight back on his own two feet for the barest moment before tugging him close again. Bucky linked his fingers behind Steve’s lower back; his palms went flush against Steve’s steel spine. Steve wondered if Bucky knew the spine was easily straight now only ‘cause it wasn’t his. 

 

‘ _Ooh_ ,’ Bucky said singsongingly, shifting gears with his tone, as tho he hadn't been tenderly holding Steve all along, hadn't been kissing his neck. His hands slid along Steve’s body, driving a satisfied shiver in Steve’s nerves. ‘Ooh, are we getting up to something?’

 

Bucky kissed him gently; he was gentle even as he trapped Steve’s slight wrists under a complete circle of his warm grip. He kissed like he meant it, like he always had. Steve squirmed, pulling his hands away. Bucky held his hands up and tried to step away, not mockingly, but giving Steve some space. Sometimes it was all too much. Sometimes Steve didn’t like when people touched the prosthetic itself. The shifting, unmanageable plates could pinch, could splash blood onto their skin. He hurried to settle his human hand on Bucky's hip so he wouldn't pull away completely. Bucky stayed.

 

'You all right?' Bucky asked, ever the gentleman. Steve nodded desperately. He pulled Bucky closer. He kept his other hand at his side, like a weapon, to himself; he didn’t know if Bucky could understand what Steve couldn’t say. They’d known each other so well before, but even then, when Steve had known everything, they’d still fought from time to time and had done so fiercely.

 

'I want—' Steve tried, but he didn’t know what to say. ‘I want,’ he said instead, insistently. Bucky’s smile turned into a grin. He backed himself away from their bathroom vanity—he tugged Steve by the hem of his shirt along with him—towards their bed. He nipped briefly and teasingly at Steve's jaw; Steve felt a gasp break out of him. Bucky snickered but the superficial annoyance only fueled the heat starting in Steve.

 

Steve’s shirt stuck over the bend of his metal shoulder when Bucky tried to remove it, the material catching as always on the edges of metal— _razor, knife, weapon_ —plates as they tried to shift with his movement. Bucky clearly wanted to yank the shirt was clean off, but he only tugged the back of Steve’s shirt lightly to loose the caught material. The picks stayed small. There were no big rips, no tears, no slashes of metal along flesh like knives or razors or scalpels. Everything was fine. Before Steve could lavish affection unto Bucky, Bucky gave Steve a little push, catching the back of his knees and sending him backwards onto their mattress. Bucky tossed his own shirt away. 

 

Bucky leaned down to kiss Steve’s sternum. He laid his giant shoulders down across Steve, even if he kept his weight mostly to himself, like Steve were still delicate, like they were still themselves. His skin was bare and literally hot against Steve's knees, thighs. Bucky ran so God damned hot since his serum, like his very cells burned brighter. Steve's heart leapt underneath the tender, warm touch. It didn’t stutter like it used to; it was strong and sure and it loved Bucky. 

 

'What do you want, Stevie?' Bucky asked like he wanted to know Steve’s order at Katz’s, not like he was licking and biting at Steve’s midriff. 'Huh?' he prompted, when Steve just tilted his head back and closed his eyes, so he wouldn’t have to watch. Bucky slotted his thumbs under the futuristic elastic of his shorts, making like he was gonna tug them down but not actually moving them. 

 

'Bucky,' Steve whined, and Bucky chuckled into Steve’s belly before biting each of his hipbones. Even with the muscle Steve’s serum had added, he was slender and small in comparison to Bucky; his hips had been Bucky’s favourite thing to leave love bites on before. They were still his favourite; even if hickeys healed too quickly to enjoy and even now that he could leave them on Steve’s neck for any of their friends to see, he left them along the curve of flesh-over-bone. He left them just as frequently. Steve groaned and his hips twitched best they could in Bucky’s grip. Bucky’s grip was stronger now than it had ever been, and while Steve’s strength could rival Bucky’s, the twitch of his hips was easily stopped. 

 

'What do you want, sweetheart?' Bucky pressed, biting again, harsher. Steve would have been embarrassed at the noise he made any other time. 'I think I know,' Bucky murmured, his breath hot on Steve’s stomach, 'but you gotta tell me.' 

 

'Buck, I want your mouth,' Steve said urgently. He wrapped his hand around Bucky’s wrist, begging it higher on his hip, begging him, please. Bucky kissed the soft skin under his navel and leaned back up to Steve’s mouth. He licked his way inside as he tugged the elastic waistband down. Steve wriggled out of his shorts, tugging at the waistband of Bucky’s too. Bucky rolled away for the barest of seconds, practically ripping his own shorts off. Steve laughed and Bucky gave him a weightless glare. 

 

'Don’t make _fun_ ,' he snapped. 'Jeez, offer to suck a guy off and he laughs at you.' 

 

'I’m not laughing,' Steve lied. Bucky hovered above him and bit his lower lip. Steve shivered. 'Come on, Buck, please?' 

 

'You’re lucky I love you,' Bucky told him as he lowered himself on their ridiculous mattress to kiss teasingly at Steve’s inner thigh. 

 

'I am,' Steve agreed. He was lucky. He couldn’t believe how lucky, some days, especially on the days memory broke thru his scars and blinded him with images of destruction and torture and death. He couldn’t believe Bucky loved him past it. He couldn’t believe Bucky truly, honestly believed they weren’t his fault. He couldn’t believe Bucky thought he was guiltier than Steve, for the men they’d killed and gotten killed in the war. He couldn’t believe Bucky was still his, all this time later. He couldn’t believe how God damned lucky he was.

 

It was real, whether Steve believed it or not, because Bucky lowered his mouth onto Steve and the hot, wet perfection of his mouth forced Steve to let out an almost embarrassing whine. Bucky said he had never been able to keep his mouth shut, not even in bed, and it was probably true because sounds and words bubbled up from the warmth in his belly and spilled out before he could stop them. Muscle memory demanded he snap his hand across his mouth and bruise his knuckle with his teeth rather than cry aloud with the pleasure Bucky gave him. He didn’t have to keep quiet now. He used to bite his left foreknuckles but they were metal now and would surely break his teeth. He was so fucking _lucky_ , if Bucky loved him like this—

 

'Oh, my,' he sighed instead. Bucky stroked his thumb against Steve’s side in a familiar cue. He forced his eyes open and looked down at Bucky. He looked down at the image of Bucky between his legs, his mouth taut about Steve’s cock, and it was too perfect to even comprehend. It fired up the furnace of desire Steve felt for Bucky, made the bellows heave and Steve’s heart race to keep up. 'Oh, my God, Bucky, you look fucking amazing,' he blurted. 'Oh, God _damn_ it; aren’t you a fucking sight.' 

 

'You’re the best damn thing I’ve ever seen,' he said, and another embarrassing series of sounds broke out of his chest as Bucky lowered his mouth with a bit of extra suction. It felt like a reward, like thanks. His head fell back onto the mattress. Bucky’s mouth delighted Steve while Bucky dug his fingernails into Steve’s hips, then slid his hands to Steve’s thighs, high then low and back, holding and touching and feeling. It took Steve minutes to work back up to words strung into sentences, words more than curses and prayers. He wanted to look, to watch Bucky; he pushed with his metal elbow, propping himself just a bit, staring down at his partner as his other hand fisted in the comforter. 'Holy shit, _Bucky_ , you are the best damn thing.' 

 

'You’re just saying that 'cause I got your dick in my mouth,' Bucky challenged, moving to kiss at Steve’s balls. His hands snaked around to hold the bruises his mouth had left on Steve’s bones. He licked a line across Steve’s right thigh, as tho from inseam up, and Steve jerked sharply with the sharp sensation of a memory and its twin played aloud. _Bucky’s hands held him down._ The image flickered for a moment in front of his eyes but faded from the parts where it was when this Bucky, his Bucky, real Bucky, grinned up at Steve. He opened his mouth to brag about causing Steve to jerk like that but Steve interrupted him. 

 

‘Do that again,’ he dared. ‘You’ve done it before; do it again.’ Bucky complied, kissing and biting before licking his way along—Steve remembered—he had a final scar there, one last mark on his skin. He didn’t remember what it looked like—he would have to sit up and check—but he remembered it was there. He remembered Bucky kissing it a long time ago, just like he did now, under the memory of then. 

 

He remembered the sick feeling he’d had, looking at the scars after the doctors had left him alone for a moment in the tents. He had been fresh from Azzano, so fresh a nurse had helped his shaking hands bathe away the stink of months of imprisonment. She’d been kind the way most army nurses Steve knew were, cold and efficient. She had ignored his shame as she helped him frankly; he didn’t remember her name. He remembered her washing away the crunch of blood from his hair and the ink of the scientists’ notes and labels from his skin. When she’d left him alone, he’d stared at the scars from the ambush and the absence of the scars he’d earned as a boy. He had wished HYDRA has just killed him instead of making him hurt so badly he’d grown a new part of himself made of fear. He used to look at the new scars and wonder if the wounds that they’d come from had leaked his lifeblood after all, if this empty half-person he was now was all he’d be until he was shot in battle or sent to another factory or if he’d be sent after the next ambush to a camp to be exterminated, or if he’d get better if he could get over the nightmares, or if he really did need to be shipped home. He used to stare at the scars and his stomach would burn with its own acid, empty.

 

He didn’t look at the scar now; he left the spot blank and covered it with Bucky’s lips in his mind instead. Bucky licked a smear of precome from Steve’s belly; the spot was coolly damp after the swipe of Bucky’s hot tongue. Steve gasped and writhed, curling his feet over Bucky’s sides, his lifeblood forgotten. He felt alive now; his stomach was full of want. 

 

‘What do you want, sweetheart?’ Bucky whispered, worshiping Steve’s skin with his lips and his teeth and his hands and the bump of his nose as he kissed Steve’s body and worshiped him. The idea seemed impossible, but Steve didn’t know how else to describe what Bucky was doing to him. 

 

Often, Steve would bitch and moan and bully Bucky into shutting up and sucking him off, but tonight he used his legs to pull Bucky back up his chest. He pulled Bucky’s wrist up too. He made Bucky to roll onto his back with a gentle push, and he slid his warm, trustworthy hand in askance between Bucky’s legs. 

 

'Oh, _God_ , yes,' Bucky replied, twisting into him, towards him. Steve remembered being drunk always made him randy. He remembered they’d been drinking Jimmy Watson’s floorboard hooch the first night they’d kissed. Steve had been too drunk that night, not Bucky. Things were different now. 

 

He got to reach for _fancy_ lube now—lube made especially for _this_ , not nicked Vaseline that left one of them icky in a tricky-to-clean spot—and he got to run his mouth as much as he wanted as he worked Bucky open. Bucky didn’t shush him. He wasn’t anymore desperate for the neighbours to remain under the impression Bucky was a popular fella with the ladies. They didn’t need to deflect gossip of why Bucky hadn’t married; lots of people thought any bad weather or sickness could take little Stevie Rogers in the night, that _only for now_ Bucky was taking care of an invalid instead of a wife, like some noble martyr. It used to sort of piss Steve off, the way people talked about Bucky, living with Steve and bringing home far more than half of what they had to live on. At least it stopped people from getting suspicious of a pair of twenty-three-year-old bachelors who rarely went with a nice girl. The last thing they had needed was to spend, at best, ten days in prison, to have to find rooms and jobs with that conviction following them around. Nothing could pull them apart now, it seemed. 

 

Steve laid next to Bucky, kissing his neck and tasting his skin as he pressed the slip of his first finger into Bucky. He revelled in Bucky as he made marks to remember this against Bucky’s collarbone with his mouth. Bucky held him with an arm over his shoulders, a hand gripping sporadically at Steve’s nape.

 

'You’re so good to me,' Steve said into Bucky’s neck as he worked in his second finger. Bucky whined into his ear, his hand going tight on Steve’s neck, over the age-old scar beneath his hairline. Steve supposed it had to have come from the artillery shrapnel he’d been hit with in that ambush by Zola’s men, like all his other scars, along his face and his ribcage. The arm that had scars was gone. He hadn’t noticed the one on his neck until the first time Bucky took him from behind after the serum; he’d mentioned it to Steve who hadn’t even known it was there. He thought Bucky had taken to holding him like this after the scar appeared, but he couldn’t possibly be sure. He didn’t remember that. 'I can’t believe you trust me like this—' 

 

''Course I trust you, Stevie,' Bucky whispered back, his voice like paper as the sensations of Steve inside him made him go shaky. 'You’re all I got.' 

 

'Yeah, I got you; I got you,' Steve promised between kisses. 'You’re my best girl, Buck; you’re my—my fucking _world_ , Bucky, everything; y’always have been.' 

 

‘ _Yes_ ,' Bucky keened, his hips canting into Steve’s hand as he stroked around the sensitive spot inside Bucky. 'Just like that, _fuck_.' 

 

'I’m always gonna take care of you,' Steve said, rubbing even as Bucky nearly shook a part from it, hitching his leg higher for Steve. 'I got you; I want you like you wouldn’t believe, Buck, like you wouldn’t believe, damn.' He worked in with fingers slick anew, stretching Bucky open with a third digit now.

 

'Steve,' Bucky begged, his hand flexing randomly on Steve’s neck. 'Steve, please.' He was taking Steve’s fingers so well, the muscle unable to resist the sure and strong digits. Steve shifted his weight where it leant on his metal arm; he moved closer to Bucky, urging little noises of pleasure out of him easily, organically. 'Stevie,' Bucky begged. His hand lost its grip, nails scraping slightly as his hand slid across the back of Steve's neck. 'Steve, _please_.' 

 

'You’re sure you’re ready?' Steve asked, as he moved to the vee of Bucky’s legs, because Bucky often got ahead of himself when they did this. He didn’t know what the point of asking was, because Bucky begged and pleaded even if he wasn’t ready, and Steve couldn’t deny him, not this. He used the remaining slick on his human hand to stroke Bucky’s cock after he’d done his, lining himself up. Bucky’s legs held him close and he reached up to cup Steve’s neck with both hands. He pulled Steve down to kiss him hotly. Steve whimpered. 

 

'God, I love you,' Steve whispered, breaking their kiss for a second as he pressed in. Bucky blew out a shaky breath; Steve kissed him as slowly as he pushed, gentle and teasing and as sweet as he could manage. 'Oh, my God, I love you _so much,_ ' he said again, unable to contain himself, resting fully seated in Bucky and stroking him slowly with an upward curve in his wrist. 'You’re so good to me,' he promised. He mouthed along Bucky’s jawline. Bucky tipped his head back to give him full access. 'You feel so good, so _perfect_. You’re perfect,' he promised, like Bucky often did him. Steve usually batted that compliment away, but Bucky soaked it up with a heartfelt moan.

 

'You gotta move, Steve,' Bucky said eventually, his legs shaking against Steve’s sides. Steve braced himself up with his metal hand, moving gently as he tried to place himself just right. ' _Oh_ ,' Bucky gasped sharply when the angle was right, and Steve let the head of his cock drag over that spot. Bucky made this wrecked sort of noise and Steve tasted the skin of his neck. He rocked teasingly to hear the fricatives Bucky would let out. Those fricatives were enough to make him feel drunk and tender; the feeling of Bucky around him was surely enough to end him. 

 

‘I can remember the first time we did this,' Steve whispered before biting Bucky’s earlobe delicately, holding Bucky in his teeth just for a moment, to feel Bucky writhe against him. He lengthened his thrusts, extending the space between Bucky’s whimpers and noises. His nails scraped again bluntly over the sensitive line of scar tissue on the back of his neck. Steve rewarded Bucky with a nuzzling moan but he didn’t let the spark that ran down his spine stutter his hips. 

 

‘You were so scared,’ Steve reminded Bucky, because the first time they’d made love like this he had been. Bucky had been so afraid, of God’s wrath, and his family’s if they found out about them, and if it would hurt or if they would regret it, this thing which couldn’t be taken back, as tho it could be a sin. ‘You’re not scared anymore; you’re here and you’re mine and I remember, Buck, I _remember_ you.' Bucky sobbed, holding him so tightly Steve would have been bruised for weeks before—he had bruised so easily before—but now wouldn’t leave a mark. He wouldn’t bruise now, and even if he did, it would heal by morning; no one would ever know. Bucky’s thighs were starting to shake, his knees hugging Steve’s sides tightly as he got closer. 

 

Bucky’s left hand fell to Steve’s metal bicep, scrambling for purchase against the sensations Steve was giving him. The feeling of Bucky’s hand on the metal was still overwhelming and new, and the feeling of the metal plates shifting under Bucky’s hand stuttered Steve’s rhythm with fear. He tried to pull his arm away from Bucky’s perfect skin.

 

‘ _Careful_ —’ Steve warned, thinking of rips along the inside of all his shirts, where metal touched and tore, and of pocked sheets on his side of the bed, of the occasional deep, _bloody_ , painful pinch he gave himself when he used the arm like it was his own; even now, when he had control of his body no matter how confused he got about where he was, he couldn’t stop it from tearing and wrecking and breaking. When it cut him, he healed in a few minutes: no concern. It didn’t matter. But Bucky would heal slower, and other people slower still. The arm was a _weapon_ ; it was _dangerous_ ; Bucky had to be _careful_ —

 

‘It’s good,’ Bucky promised, his other hand tangling into Steve’s hair, heedless of the implant he usually avoided surreptitiously, as tho his avoidance of any part of Steve was something Steve didn’t notice. He pulled Steve closer, closer still, his hips straining up off the bed and into Steve’s lap. ‘’S _so_ good, it’s good—’ Steve couldn’t help but believe that it was all right, with Bucky sounding like that. He couldn’t help but believe everything would be OK when Bucky grabbed him and bravely held on. 

 

‘Careful,’ he whispered, unable to help it, even as he let Bucky’s pleasure soothe him. He was too intoxicated by the feel of Bucky around him like this, the feel of Bucky holding him for dear life, breathing roughly and making incoherent sounds, to hold onto worry. He was too intoxicated by Bucky to do much other than fuck him the way he liked to be fucked. Bucky made every sound of pleasure that floated out of him as easily as he took Steve in. Steve felt like his noises and words were breaking out of him; there was nothing more human than loving someone like this and he’d been inhuman for so long. 

 

The thought made him push as deep into Bucky as he could go, made him stay and rock almost against that part that broke noises out of Bucky, just enough to send sparks up his spine, Steve knew. He rocked, pulling Bucky’s face to his own and kissing him and kissing him and kissing him, swallowing the noises Bucky made as his own. Eventually, Bucky broke away from his lips, breathing harsh, the constant stimulation too much. 

 

'What is it?' Bucky panted. Steve could feel his hand against the metal arm and the _sensation_ was incredible on its own, a warm hand touching the most dangerous part of him so gently, with love.

 

'I don’t know,' Steve admitted. He couldn’t stop touching Buck, running his hand wherever he could reach. Bucky swiped his hand thru Steve’s hair. ‘I feel a lot like myself right now. I don’t know,’ he said, because he’d been with Bucky for hours and time wasn’t what he meant. ‘I missed you.’ 

 

'I know,' Bucky promised. 'I missed you, too.' 

 

Steve kissed him once more then rocked a little further, a little longer, pulled out a little more and thrust so he could feel Bucky shake with it. He shifted his weight where it rested on his metal arm and tucked Bucky’s cock into a slow stroking palm. Steve wrapped his own hand around Bucky and Bucky make such a deep, honest noise. It came from the bottom of his throat. 

 

Steve could feel the shake in Buck's legs, could feel the tense muscle of his stomach against his knuckles on every upstroke. He couldn’t imagine what words were breaking out of his chest now; he couldn’t keep track of them; he only knew how wonderful Bucky felt when his legs shook with pleasure against Steve’s sides, when Steve made him feel like this. Steve could see the scratch of hair on Bucky’s chest dampening with sweat, could measure easily the red flush creeping up his stomach and staining his neck, begging to be kissed even darker. 'You like that, don’t you?' he asked, and Bucky moaned as he nodded desperately, trying to thrust into Steve’s movements. 

 

'You love this,' Steve pointed out, his own breath coming harder. He brushed his thumb firmly over the exposed, slick head of Bucky’s cock just to hear Bucky whine. 'You love when we do this, don’t you?' 

 

'I love it,' Bucky agreed, his voice almost cracking even as it came out soft and barely audible. He rolled his hips into Steve’s desperately. Bucky strained, getting closer with every moment, somehow. 'Oh, _Steve, please, please,_ don’t stop.'

 

'Show me that you love it,' Steve demanded, recognizing that crack for what it meant. 'Paint yourself pretty, Buck; come on, Buck, lemme see.' 

 

'So close,' Bucky promised. 'Stevie, I’m _so_ close.' 

 

'Paint a picture for me,' Steve ordered, and Bucky came, white strands dancing across his chest. Steve watched the lines dash across Bucky, across the folds of his skin and his muscle, a work of art only Steve would ever get to see. He almost sobbed at the sensation of Bucky coming, the hot press of the muscle around him, dropping his head into Bucky’s shoulder and his hips snapping as he came too. 

 

Their first time making love like this had been in a boarding house they were already going to be evicted from, late one too many times on the weekly fee. The guy had felt bad for Steve, his crooked back and the enormous sack of newspapers he hauled all day, selling in the windy fall; he’d let them stay until the next Sabbath once he’d told them he had to get rid of them, to find a new place that could let them be late. They’d been leaving anyway and Bucky had been so afraid of hurting Steve that Steve had fucked Bucky first. Bucky had so- _so_ -so-silently came, had painted him a pretty picture then too, even if it had taken years before Steve was brave enough to tell Buck how fucking hot he looked coming all over his own chest. Steve gotten to lick it off before Bucky had his religious crisis, got to mouth at parts of Bucky he'd never gotten to explore when they'd made love before, dizzy from the exertion of fucking and breathless with how worth it the bands around his lungs were. Steve had loved the look of amazement in Bucky’s eyes after Steve kissed him and tasted of more. He barely remembered, now, the way it had morphed into horror. 

 

He didn’t think he’d ever remember clearly, because every time they did this now, Bucky smiled like everything was all right for the night, like things were good, which was often far better than they were. His face never morphed to anything bad now, all Steve’s to enjoy. Today, he grinned right at Steve, unselfconsciously naked. Steve kissed his neck, tasting the sweat and feeling Bucky’s approving hum against his lips. 

 

'Yeah,' Steve panted after he’d gently pulled out and licked Bucky clean, after he’d licked the second painting Buck made away too. The arm released a dose of his asthma medication and his breaths came easier immediately. 'I think you like that.' 

 

'Shut up,' Bucky grumbled, pulling him close as they settled to sleep. Bucky was a little sticky with sweat still, but Steve didn’t mind. 'I only claimed I didn’t that one time.' He kissed the top of Steve’s head. 'You taught me better real fast.' 

 

^^^

 

‘You have a phone call,’ an LEO said, appearing at Bucky’s side. He stared at her over the maps and evac routes on the table onto which he had leaned his fists. The Main Town cell had been surrounded by undercover forces loaned from the Canadians; the evacuation of Gdańsk would begin in twenty-one minutes and the strike against the Main Town HYDRA cell would begin in ninety-seven. The Main Town had been completely built back up since Bucky had been in Gdańsk last; if he could manage it, the city would stay standing this time around. ‘Sir,’ she added, as tho that was why Bucky was staring at her. 

 

‘We are ninety-seven minutes from go,’ he said.

 

‘It’s an emergency call,’ she offered, still holding out the cellular phone to him. ‘Sir.’ He took it; he could hear the regretfully-familiar sounds of press and paparazzi in the back of the line. Bucky frowned. That felt like a bad sign. 

 

‘Barnes,’ he greeted. 

 

‘Bucky. Steve was just arrested,’ Pepper told him, without preamble. The sounds of reporters and shouts behind her filtered out suddenly. She leapt to his mind’s eye immediately, pulling a car door shut behind her and only behind the tint letting herself become flustered. He felt his legs carry him away from the conference table, away from the mild protests of the evac coordinators. 

 

‘They can’t arrest him,’ Bucky said plainly as he stepped into the hallway. He couldn’t imagine a world where Pepper hadn’t insisted just that when Buck wasn’t around to have Steve’s back. ‘They can't do that. Who arrested him?’ he demanded.

 

‘Four New York state officers showed up at the prosthetics event,’ Pepper replied. ‘They took him into custody before he met with any of the veterans who volunteered.’

 

‘They can’t do that,’ Bucky repeated. It felt like a skipping record was scraping along in his stomach: Steve was supposed to be protected from legal recourse until his security restrictions were lifted, Steve was supposed to be left alone until Melissa released him from deprogramming, Bucky was supposed to be there when Steve had to eventually face the music. Steve was supposed to be safe until the breakdowns stopped. ‘I’m on my—’ he started by habit, before realizing he couldn't possibly leave Poland in the next hour; he couldn’t leave in the next five days, providing things went well. Lives depended on the three strikes Bucky would lead in the next five days; Steve depended on him too. He had to stay and he had to go. 

 

‘ _Fuck_ , I can’t come. Fuck, I don’t know when I’m going to be able to come.’ He tore a hand thru his hair. He could feel his heart desperately pounding behind his sternum. ‘Pepper, I’m gonna be in Poland for almost a week, at least. What’s gonna happen?’ 

 

‘The DA will officially charge him in the next twenty-four hours; he’ll be indicted soon after that, and Herieth will be there with him every second she can,’ Pepper explained. ‘There might be a day or three between the indictment and the arraignment. I can't imagine the court won't let him come home in that time.’ That assurance did not soothe Bucky. The broken record in his stomach sped up; the splintered edges caught at his sides. He was going to bleed out in the hallway.

 

‘Jesus Christ, I'm going to miss all of that. I should be sitting behind him; he needs me there,’ Bucky said.  'I can't believe this is happening when I can't come; Pepper, I can't come and be there for him. I'm supposed to—Is he gonna be OK?' He looked at his watch. He was running out of time. 

 

'Yes,' Pepper promised. 'He'll be fine. He's strong. This is not the worst he's been thru.' 

 

'No, but it's gonna be pretty bad,' Bucky sighed. He should be there. ‘I have to go. _Fuck_ , Pepper, I can't—’ he broke off and shook his head at himself. 'I don't know if I can do this,' he whispered. He hated feeling trapped like this. 

 

‘You can. We knew this was going to happen eventually,’ Pepper reminded him, ever a source of calm, even when she was shaken herself. ‘You prepared for this,’ she added, ‘and Herieth is already on her way. She’ll get him out of there.’ 

 

Bucky thought of their lawyer, her passion and her damned insistence that just because Steve’s case was the biggest of its kind didn’t mean that the prosecution could throw a victim to the dogs; there were laws for programmed operatives like Steve and America should follow them. Bucky hoped, now, that it might be enough on its own. They had only just started working with her; Melissa had finally given Steve an expected release date and they were supposed to have had four months before any charges would come down. Herieth was supposed to know every detail Steve had by the time they had to start facing trial; she wasn’t supposed to be hauled to his defense after he’d been arrested at a charity event. 

 

‘Jesus,’ Bucky cursed. ‘Fuck, OK—I can't believe they arrested him while I'm in Poland.’

 

‘I mean, it's the first time he's been out in public for any extended period of time without you,’ Pepper hedged. Bucky should have made Tony schedule the prosthetics event around his missions. He had thought this awesome, positive event should be something the public saw Steve doing on his own; he hadn't planned on attending, even before the Poland strikes dates had been decided. He should’ve realised invading Steve’s good publicity might have protected him better. ‘Tony’s had Herieth on call for the night of the event since you first settled the Poland cell strikes.’

 

‘All right,’ Bucky said, even if nothing was all right. ‘Right. OK, this is—He’ll be all right.’ He knew damn well that couldn’t be true. Steve didn’t handle this. If the police demanded answers about his actions as the Winter Soldier, Steve would lose his tenuous grip on his present. Bucky saw Steve confused and lost enough from Melissa’s questions during therapy. He’d seen Steve lose himself over sounds too-familiar-to-wartime of the city; he’d seen Steve lost for hours without cause. He knew damn well Steve wouldn’t be OK with the police urging him to relive things in colour for confession tapes. 

 

‘Yeah,’ Pepper said uselessly. ‘Rhodey’s going over to the White House to see if he can—’ 

 

‘Yeah,’ Bucky agreed, cutting Pepper off as one of the evac coordinators stuck her head into the hallway. ‘We’re moving; I gotta go.’ 

 

‘Good luck,’ Pepper said, and he hung up. 

 

‘Is everything all right, sir?’ the coordinator asked him. Bucky took a second to breathe, to shut his worry about Steve behind locked doors. He had other things he had to do. 

 

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Let’s get back to work.’ 

 

^^^

 

Panic made it hard to breathe. The asset—Steve tried to calm himself down, but he couldn’t. Something more than panic was holding his chest so tightly, and that thought brought Steve back to himself sharply. Something was wrong. His chest was too tight. He looked around. One white man sat across a metal table from him and another stood by the door; they wore suits and had covered the vaguely-reflective surface of the metal table with papers and photos. He didn’t know where he was and he felt that panic him like the burning in his chest had a twin. He usually knew where he was; he had been getting better; he wasn’t supposed to get lost anymore.

 

The cell was unfamiliar. The metal arm had been disabled and placed into a magnetic cuff, trapping it against the heavy table and cutting off the flow of tactile feedback Steve had gotten used to. Disabled, it could not release corticosteroids. The asset realized that was why panic had joined in the tightening of his chest; his metal arm was disabled; his medicine wouldn’t come. He wanted to ask the handlers to reactivate it, to find him his inhaler, to help him, but he was afraid. Fear kept the asset docile; fear was essential. His flesh arm was stronger than its appearance; the standard issue cuff wrapping its wrist would not contain it: irrelevant. Escape was impermissible; the handlers had told him to stay put. He—Something was wrong; more was wrong than the grip of asthma on his chest. He wasn't supposed to be here but he didn't know where he was supposed to be instead. 

 

‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘I want to go home.’ Something scored forcibly, frantically, against his brain and the pain was blinding. He shook his head violently. No one told him to stop. 

 

‘Look at this,’ the handler ordered. The asset stopped trying to shake the stabbing from its brain. Steve looked at the glossy photo. 

 

The photo didn't help the pain or help Steve find his way. The photo didn’t belong to now. The photo told a story that had been wiped from the asset; the photo triggered recollection protocols he wasn’t meant to have and the handlers demanded a report. The asset had been wiped; he wasn't meant to recall this mission. He wasn't meant to remember the bloodstains in the Mandalay Bay Hotel’s lush carpets. He was supposed to forget; they had wiped him and the asset was not built for recollection. It burned his eyes and tightened his skin and stung his throat to look at; he tried to turn away. 

 

‘Look at it,’ the handler ordered. Steve coughed, squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head. He wanted to refuse. It hurt; it dug at his head and burned. He shouldn't have to do it. He shouldn't have to do things that hurt. His lungs demanded he tilt his head back and try to move more air, but his own hand shook with fear and he couldn’t expose his throat to the handlers, not even to breathe, had to keep his chin down. He coughed again, trying to force the next inhale to be easy. ‘Hey, you. Open your eyes.’ The asset followed orders. The photo was held in clear view by the handler. ‘What do you remember from this mission?’ 

 

‘The carpet was white and the blood ruined it,’ Steve blurted. He couldn’t force his words at more than half-voice. The asset remembered the blood seeping and spreading across pristine fibres. ‘I wanted to put pressure on the wound.’

 

‘To hurt the Ambassador?’ the handler prompted. He wasn’t a handler; he couldn't be— _the asset had to answer his questions_ —didn't he?—someone was supposed to know. He wasn't supposed to be alone. ‘What information did you obtain before you murdered her?’

 

‘I—I think I was a medic before,’ the asset said, trying to remember why the asset would try to stop a target’s bleeding— _The asset moved the body back onto its side, three-quarters prone and one arm raised—_ prone: take the shot, make the kill, complete the mission _—and then counted breaths again_ —The handler barked another question, an order, something. The asset didn’t understand him past the swell and confusion of memory, like waves and water lapping over his head and drowning out the handler’s voice. The asset panicked, because if it had missed an order it would be punished and there was already confusion and pain. 

 

The handler held a photo and the asset looked at it, whether or not that was the order, to try to hide that the asset didn’t know; _Steve_ stared at it—he was Steve and he stared at the photo, at the body strewn and the head in pieces across a thick carpet. He remembered it, he realized, as the memory burned its way thru his forebrain. The pain matched his tight lungs and the remembering of the horrible sights in front of him made him reel back and away from the photo. He moved back before he could help it, trying to pull away from the table as tho the distance from the photo would take the hot wet of blood around both his hands—it was impossible but he felt it. He felt the blood on both hands, like lakes cupped in his palms—the prosthetic couldn’t feel wetness; the sensation was phantom; the asset had never felt blood on the metal hand; Steve had felt blood as a medic, as a soldier, as a boy who bled too easily and coughed too much. The cuffs stopped him from flinching back too far. The standard cuff dug into his right arm and the magnetic cuff tugged up at the metal bones of his shoulder when he moved back too quickly, too far. The cuffs jerked him to a stop. He tried to breathe.

 

He had stared at the blood then too, Steve realised; he’d been mesmerized by the slow movement of stark and vivid colours, and something had urged him to put pressure on the wounds, like when he had been a medic. The asset hadn't known any of that; the asset simply logged and later reported an unrecognized protocol. It was the smallest moment and the asset— _Steve_ remembered it so clearly, just that second. Her husband’s chest was practically in pieces and she lay bleeding into the carpet. Steve remembered the completed task in that moment. It had meant nothing, not even nothing; the asset had been a machine, without meaning. The asset had left the woman to die and had logged the impulse to save the woman as an unrecognized protocol. 

 

Steve felt sick at himself. His exhale shook on the way out; his breath whistled on the way in. Steve whispered, ‘I used to stop the bleeding, before.’

 

‘So you _chose_ not to save her?’ the handler asked, loud, demanding, electric, needling the gouges in Steve’s memory. ‘You shot her and provided no medical attention despite your want and ability to do so. Admit you knew what you were doing. You knew you were committing murder and conducting espionage.’ The asset shook its head no. For the asset to disobey was _impossible_ but he did it; it burned like a red burning iron. Disobeying crushed his spine as his muscles tensed without permission; he nearly crumpled against the table. He tried to drop his head between his shoulders, to hide his face from view behind a curtain of hair—his hair was _long_ ; how much time had it been since he had been corrected?—but his lungs screamed a shrill protest and he had to lean back again. The cuff dug into his human wrist sharply; his mind mimicked the sensation in his metal wrist even more sharply, painfully, like the unreliable _liar_ it was. His hair was long; he wasn't the asset. He was Steve. 

 

‘It was a _glitch_ ,’ the asset begged. Begging was useless. Punishment always came when handlers were displeased. This handler was angry. His partner lingered by the door but the asset knew both men were capable of giving the order for reconditioning. Reconditioning hurt and if the asset couldn’t breathe by then, the electricity would _snap_ thru empty ribs and that would be a unique torture. ‘I didn't choose. I'm sorry, please; I'm so _sorry_.’ Begging hurt too. The asset couldn't breathe. 

 

‘Why?’ the handler demanded. The asset tried to press the flesh hand against its sternum, to warn that there wasn’t enough air, but the wrist was caught in a cuff. The handlers had lashed the asset’s hands down. He could feel fear travelling like cold paws along his pained ribs, creeping thru his muscles. 

 

‘I don't—I followed orders,’ Steve pleaded. Orders were weaker than what the asset had had to follow. The whistle in his lungs sharpened. ‘I followed the _programming_. The asset _cannot_ save. The asset cannot _choose_. The asset has no _choice_.’

 

‘Is that all you remember?’ 

 

‘No.’ The word broke out unbidden. He wasn't supposed to talk alone. That protocol— _it wasn't a protocol; it wasn't programming but something else_ —leapt up without a clear origin. Steve didn't know where he was. He didn't know when that rule came from. ‘Someone should be here,’ he tried to protest. ‘There's _supposed_ to be someone here. I can’t _breathe_.’ 

 

‘You’re fine,’ the handler told him. Steve looked up, staring at the face of a handler he didn’t recognise. He didn't know where he was. He wanted to go home but the year was different and sometimes he lived in ice. He tried to push stale air out of his lungs. He wanted new air and the need was starting to override his thinking, made it too hard to follow the officer’s questions. ‘What else do you remember?’

 

‘Where am I?’ he asked instead of answering. He couldn't be the asset because that shouldn't have been possible. ‘Is Bucky coming?’ Steve was sure he always came. 

 

‘What else do you remember?’ the handler repeated. 

 

 

‘I don't _know_ ,’ Steve gasped. He coughed roughly in his body's desperate attempt to expel dead, useless air. He needed new air; he needed to exhale so he could breathe in but he couldn’t make the air go out. He could hear his wheezing sharply. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know anything. He felt lost. Being lost was horrifying; he had been lost when HYDRA took him back. He didn’t want to go back but he was with handlers already and _someone was supposed to be here_.

 

‘What else do you remember?’ the handler repeated, his volume rising. Steve shook. ‘Answer the question, soldier.’

 

‘The asset was supposed to kill the child,’ the asset managed. The programming felt like armour, like something to hide behind; the asset didn’t exist, the asset wasn’t a person, the asset had survived worse than this, when Steve wasn’t himself anymore and Steve didn’t know what to do. Steve needed to breathe but the asset was machine. ‘Final target acquisition was interrupted by the unrecognized protocol.’

 

‘An unrecognized protocol?’

 

‘Maintenance is _required_ —the lungs—’ 

 

‘You’re fine,’ the handler snapped, and the word looped crazily in the asset’s head even as the handler went on. Fine fine _fine fine fine_ fine. It echoed again and again, fine _fine_ , a warbling ape of the handler’s voice. He kept talking but Steve couldn’t hear him. He held up a photo, of the child with a wide grin and happy eyes, a school photo, fine _fine_ fine fine; memory swam in full colour in front of Steve’s eyes.

 

Steve remembered the girl in the photo well enough that she felt like an incredible stone, pressing him down, _fine_ , crushing him downwards even as the metal bands around his chest resisted his cowering. The muscles were too tense in an effort to breathe to let his shoulders hunch and let Steve try to hide. He remembered standing over the child's bed, her little green pyjamas, and her little bear. He wasn’t moving enough air; his vision swam and he could see it all in place of the room in front of him. He could see the knife in his hand and he _thought_ —he didn't _log_ ; he didn't _process_ ; he didn't _glitch_ —he _thought_. There was a _difference_ and Steve remembered that night. He remembered thinking. It had been the first time he’d thought since they first sliced his head open; the asset hadn’t known at the time. The asset had heard the thought and it didn’t fit in the programming but felt like something Important nonetheless, which was impossible—fine fine _fine fine fine_ fine. He had thought that he should report the unknown protocol before killing the child— _fine_ fine _fine_. He had known he had to be back on ice and smuggled away from the mission site, but he waited at rendezvous for hours to report the unrecognized protocol’s interruption of final target acquisition and to report both primary targets confirmed. Steve wondered if someone else had gone back to kill the child— _fine fine_ —if anyone else could have made it in and out past the security— _fine fine fine_ —if his first thought actually saved anyone. 

 

He remembered the damp rendezvous in an abandoned construction site and the violent, red graffiti on the walls— _the claw marks inside of the showers were the only indication that they were really gas chambers—they stopped the train to wrench doors open to find only bodies of children, baked til dead in cattle cars under the wartime summer sun—the rendezvous had been underground and with half-finished drywall—violent, red graffiti—_

 

He remembered the mold and dust which had bothered his airways and the handlers’ rage and the drugs which had burned his blood to get him ready for the cryochamber. He didn’t want to freeze. He hadn’t wanted to kill the child; he convinced his programme that the unrecognized protocol was a bigger threat than the child. He hadn’t been ready for the pain of weeding out a foreign protocol, for the pain of punishment— _fine fine fine_ fine—they took the memory of the pain from him; he reported the next unrecognized protocol just as obediently, fine. Steve could remember the pain now. Nausea swelled inside him.

 

A hand banged on the table in front of him. The noise of it hit him before the sight of the world in front of him. Sight blended back in dizzyingly. A shout rose, angry, demanding, giving orders. The asset wanted to duck its head to display fear, display submission, to submit to conditioning, to maintenance, to correction— _’Obedience protocol,’ the handler said, before the asset’s muscles had finished spasming with cold and the deep burn of the warming chemicals in the blood. The asset stuck out its non-weaponized hand, unable to uncurl its fingers; they betrayed the system, too frozen to bend. The handler grabbed them and wrenched stiff digits_ —Steve wanted to tilt his chin back and push the dead air out of his lungs and breathe in something good, something rich with oxygen. The voice rose at the end: a question. The asset—Steve didn’t understand; he could see men and metal and a light but he couldn’t feel his arm and he couldn’t breathe and he didn’t _understand_ —

 

_—the scalpel drove across his frozen palm where nerves were just waking up; blood felt hot against the skin and the blade screamed. The asset was not allowed to pull away; the asset allowed the injury and accepted the pain. The asset was silent. The asset was shaking; why? The handler released him after two more slashes, satisfied. They left him to defrost and the skin to knit back together_ —Steve shook his head, pointlessly trying to breathe. 

 

‘I don’t know—’ he managed, because he wasn’t at a rendezvous point. He wasn’t the asset anymore. The year was different. ‘I can’t—breathe. Please?’ He didn’t know what he was begging for or whom he was begging. Something scored forcibly, frantically against his brain and the pain was blinding. He shook his head violently. No one told him to stop. ‘Why can’t I—I _can’t breathe_ ,’ he begged. He didn’t want to be frozen, not without some air, _please_ , God, no, not again, _please_ ; he could see the tank and the handlers and doctors swarming and he could feel the unknown protocol being drilled away when he was strapped down and his hair ripped out by dull clippers, scraping his scalp to blood in their haste— _waking up would hurt more in the reanimated throes of attack_ —he had to breathe—

 

He tried to gasp but he couldn’t, something stopped him— _’Are we only torturing him?' asked a young nurse, in Russian, which was starting to piece together. 'Weapons cannot be tortured,' a voice replied, assured. 'Only fixed.' The mask lashed to his face flooded and his scalp was again pulled away as the world faded—_

 

‘Soldier, answer the question,’ the handler demanded. The sound of his voice filtered back into Steve’s perception, drowning out the sight of the child’s bed in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, drowning out the sharp smell of copper from the murdered parents, the feeling of his own mind being broken away from him. ‘What stopped you from killing the child?’ Someone knocked, and the asset flinched at the unexpected noise of it. The handlers exchanged looks. One of them opened the door as Steve leaned forward, his neck and shoulder muscles straining and failing to open his chest.

 

‘Excuse me,’ the handler at the door said, cracking it open. ‘Can I help you?’ Someone pushed it open the rest of the way. ' _Excuse_ me—'

 

‘I have an order for the release of Private Rogers,’ a woman’s voice replied. 

 

‘Jesus, Steve,’ a man outside the door said. Steve didn’t look over; his vision was swimming.

 

‘You have no right to come in here,’ the handler told the man who barged past him. 

 

‘You have no right to hold my client here, actually,’ the woman corrected. 

 

‘Steve,’ someone else called, much closer than the continuing woman’s voice. The asset couldn’t breathe. The man was close enough to be a concern, a threat, a handler with the mouthguard or a nurse with a needle of fire or death. The man— _very dark skin, short black hair, and neat goatee, five-foot-ten, formidably—humanly—strong, kind-eyed but that couldn’t be_ —crouched at Steve’s side and something about the look in his eyes marked him very much not a handler. The asset was terrified nonetheless; a distinct shake settled in his frame. ‘Hey, man, can you hear me?’ 

 

‘ _Excuse_ me,’ the handler with the photographs interrupted, standing and holding a hand out flat. He was angry. Where was Bucky? Where was Steve? ‘You don’t get to remove him—’

 

‘My name’s Sam. I came to get you,’ the man told him, over other voices protests. ‘That’s Herieth, your lawyer. D’you remember us, bud?’ Steve didn’t—couldn’t—look over; he tucked his head into his shoulder and coughed and _coughed_ and coughed. ‘Steve?’ 

 

A comforting hand landed on his back, below the nape of his neck and over the fabric of his shirt. The shirt felt damp with sweat. The asset didn’t know why but he trusted the hand against his spine. It wouldn’t hurt him. It was here to help. It couldn’t help; Steve knew. His lungs were too tight. This was the scary kind of asthma attack, the kind a herb cigarette didn’t help, that his mother couldn’t talk him thru and a cold cloth and a prayer didn’t fix. This was the scary kind of attack, the kind that hit him a few times a year, even when he grew out of the little ones from too quick a walk or too hot a day; this was the scary kind that he always thought would kill him out of the blue, just snuff him out dead, take him from—from _who_? From who? It was fine _fine fine fine fine; if he could get one breath in, he would be fine_ fine _fine fine fine—_

 

‘He is clearly in a state of duress,’ a woman snapped. ‘You can’t expect any testimony you’ve gotten today to be taken seriously. He’s not lucid; when I get a copy of that tape, I’m sure it’ll show how far from lucid he is. Does he know his name? Does he know where he is? Why are you talking to him without a lawyer present?’ 

 

‘He never asked for a lawyer—’ 

 

‘He’s also having a hell of an asthma attack,’ the man close to him added. Steve lifted his head to try again to get in a full and good breath; the noise his lungs made on his next inhale scared him. With Sam’s hand protecting him from the handlers, he could tilt his head back, too late for it to help. It felt like every muscle in his body was straining to expand his chest and let him breathe. He felt like air weighed eight million tons and he would never get enough of it. 

 

‘He’s fine,’ one of the handlers said. 

 

‘Hey, it’s Sam,’ the voice repeated. ‘Can you hear me, buddy?’ 

 

‘Sam?’ Steve gasped. His voice barely made a sound. ‘I _can’t_ —’ The word came out in a creak like a hinge. 

 

‘I know, buddy,’ Sam promised. Steve stared at Sam, and he did recognize Sam. Steve did know who this was. He did know Sam. Sam was a friend, Bucky’s friend, a _good_ friend. Sam escorted Steve to therapy and to synagogue; Sam headed the security team. Sam knew what it was to fight a war, and he knew what it was to be lost and breathless. ‘You’re in an interview room at a police station in New York. You were under arrest,’ Sam told him. He said other things; Steve couldn’t hear him. Steve looked over at Herieth. She was his lawyer; she was supposed to be there. The men who showed him the photos were cops of some sort, not handlers; he wasn’t going to be frozen and reconditioning was not on its way. He was Steve, not the asset. He couldn’t breathe. ‘We’re here to take you home,’ Sam said. ‘We’ll get you out of here and get you your inhaler, OK? You’ll be just fine.’ 

 

‘You should undo those cuffs,’ Herieth said quietly, but with force. Steve recognised her too. He remembered her. She was a superhero, Steve thought, to stand down officers of the law for someone like him. He’d killed so many and he could still feel the blood and she was standing up for him and he couldn’t even breathe— _’You never learned to stay down, did you, you fucking—’_

 

‘This is my collar; you’re not taking him anywhere,’ the handler snapped. 

 

‘He’s not lucid; he doesn’t even know where he is,’ Herieth pointed out, pulling a letter from her case. ‘He’s legally to be remanded to secure custody until he’s capable.’ 

 

‘Lady, you know as well as I do that that clause—’ the handler tried, but Herieth cut him off. 

 

‘What I know is that Private Rogers’ doctors say he is still unable to stand trial,’ Herieth said simply, holding out her copies. ‘He voluntarily defected. He’s entitled to recover in order to stand a fair trial. He is still in recovery. He’s in urgent need of medical attention at this exact second, gentlemen.’ 

 

‘This is not—’ 

 

‘Just because this is the first case of this magnitude doesn’t mean the law gets thrown away,’ Herieth snapped. ‘Undo his cuffs; reactivate his arm. I’ve handed you copies of two different court orders; one made your arrest illegal months ago, and the other nullifies the warrant which was issued three days ago.’ 

 

‘We’re gonna have to go up the ladder on this—’ the handler tried. 

 

‘You’ll get him out of these cuffs now, before his lips turn blue and we sue you for withholding medical attention,’ Herieth snapped. ‘Undo the cuffs and reactivate his arm so it can release his medicine.’ 

 

Steve couldn’t help it; his chest hurt and his vision was blurring. He leaned into Sam best he could in the cuffs, trying to tell Sam how tight his lungs were, even if he couldn’t possibly find the air to speak. The voices kept talking over him, but Steve closed his eyes, leaned into Sam, and tried to breathe. 

 

^^^

 

‘I cannot believe how much press is outside,’ Sam remarked quietly. Pepper looked up from her laptop and over her shoulder at him. He stood at the window of Steve’s hospital room, looking into the street below. ‘His schedule is public; you wouldn’t think reporters would show up at a hospital when they know where he is minute-by-minute every other day. I guess most days he stays in the tower, and no tabloid wants photos of a former assassin attending temple or therapy.’

 

‘The arrest was pretty well covered,’ Pepper pointed out. ‘Every tabloid wants pictures of him getting out of prison. He came right to the hospital, so that didn’t happen; when he’s discharged, they’ll want the next best thing.’ She looked back at Steve; he’d fallen asleep after the ER staff had gotten him thru the worst of the attack. He was still curled around the oxygen mask they’d given him. He'd woken up now, if he was only half-aware of his surroundings. He looked exhausted, Pepper noted as she placed her work aside on the bedtable. She gave Steve a kind smile, reaching out to stroke his hair. He watched her carefully behind his exhaustion-glazed eyes but he didn’t flinch when she touched him. 

 

‘How you doing, hon?’ she asked. Steve glanced past her at Sam, before he frowned back at her. ‘Do you remember me?’ Steve nodded around the oxygen mask, giving Pepper a slow blink. ‘OK. D’you know where you are?’ Steve considered, looking at the monitors and the aluminium frame of his hospital bed. She wondered if unfamiliar hospital rooms were scarier than other kinds of rooms, if the room looked to his addled mind more like one of HYDRA’s labs than an ICU ward. Eventually, he met her eyes again and shook his head. 

 

‘You’re in the hospital, because of an asthma attack,’ she reminded him. ‘You're safe. I bet you’re tired. You were working so hard earlier, I saw. You’re breathing easier now.’ Steve nodded again. She didn’t push for more than that. Steve was breathing more easily than when the ambulance had arrived from the police station. He’d been blue-lipped and terrifying when he’d first arrived; his nail beds had returned to normal now, but his lungs were still whistling with every inhale. Steve pulled the mask from his face with his metal hand. The artificial steadiness of the prosthetic seemed unnatural when the rest of him had a fine shake. 

 

‘Where’s Bucky?’ Steve croaked. ‘I want to go home.’ 

 

‘I know, honey,’ Pepper sighed. ‘Bucky’s in Poland, do you remember?’ Steve shook his head. He looked scared and tired. ‘Put the mask back on.’ He slid the mask back onto his mouth obediently, looking over at Sam. ‘He’s gone to take out some of the last European HYDRA bases, in Gdańsk. Sam and I are staying with you here tonight. We’ll be able to go home in the morning if you’re doing well then too.’

 

‘The other security guys are just outside, Steve,’ Sam chimed in. ‘The regular hospital security seems to be having no trouble down there, but if any reporters do make it inside, they’re not coming past the elevator.’ Steve closed his eyes again. Pepper turned to glare at Sam. It took him only a second to notice her glare from where he kept watch. 

 

‘He doesn’t need to worry about the security team and the press right now,’ she pointed out. 

 

‘Nah, he doesn’t,’ Sam agreed. ‘’S why I’ve already made arrangements to keep both things outside this room.’ Pepper rolled her eyes. She didn’t know why every single person Bucky introduced her to was such a smart ass. Even Steve on his good days would expend unnecessary effort to wind Tony up or to find Bucky’s eyes to share a look behind someone’s head. 

 

Before she could one up his retort, someone knocked. Pepper turned to the door just as a nurse stuck their head in. 

 

‘Miss Potts,’ they said. ‘Um, could you come out here for a second?’ Pepper frowned, shooting Sam a look before standing. He gravitated away from the window and toward the bed as she moved towards the door; Steve’s panic as she left him was aborted when Sam took his hand and started making promises that no one was really leaving. The nurse led her down the hall and pushed open the door to an empty procedure room just outside the entrance to the ICU. The nurse gestured her in. The door closed behind her and Pepper almost stumbled when she realised who the nurse had fetched her to see. 

 

‘Madame Attorney General,’ Pepper said. The attorney general smiled kindly, extending a hand for Pepper to shake. Pepper regretted coming into the hallway in her stocking feet, having not jammed her heels back on before answering the knock. She looked around the procedure room and felt ridiculous but underdressed. ‘It’s nice to meet you—excuse me.’ 

 

‘Not at all,’ she replied. The AG gestured to the other women crowded around the gurney and lights. ‘This is Secretary Martinez, Congresswoman Lapin, Senators Palmer and Scott, and, of course, Miss Malone, from the Federal Defenders of New York.’ Pepper nodded a little awestruckedly as she shook each woman’s hand. She wondered what she had done to be a room of such powerful people.

 

‘I was hoping I could update you on my conversations with Herieth Jefferson, who is perhaps the most fantastic defense council I’ve met in a decade,’ Attorney General Chen said. Pepper nodded uselessly. She only knew Herieth, two years out of school, by name from Bucky. ‘I wanted to speak to Private Rogers himself, but I understand he’s not exactly lucid after his interrogation.’ 

 

‘He’s not well,’ Pepper said. ‘The officers disabled his prosthetic, which is responsible for managing his asthma medication. He had an attack in custody, but the officers had confiscated his rescue inhaler with his effects, and the disabled prosthetic couldn’t release the emergency drugs it does carry. He also—They showed him some graphic images of HYDRA’sin questioning and, like Doctor Nguyen said in her report to your office, Madame Attorney General, he doesn’t have the ability to situate himself in time; volatile images like this represent a danger to him. He’s not well.’ 

 

Chen nodded; she had a wise, odd look on her face, one Pepper could not read. She was a tiny woman, truly. Pepper had known that, from photos and the news, but it was something else to tower over Chen in person. Her orange silk suit coat wrapped her as a dramatic figure and her warm, flat boots were the same colour leather as the attaché on a chair behind her. Chen hummed, peering at the women in the room from above her glasses but below her thick, peppered fringe.

 

‘And Captain Barnes, for all the badgering he does at lower doors in my department, is in Poland fighting HYDRA once again, yes?’ Chen asked. Pepper nodded. ‘I think none of us were surprised that this came to a head during his absence. Miss Potts, we, the politicians, represent the major players at the federal level who think an international truth commission would be more efficacious for the achievement of justice than a trial, in regards to the actions and fate of Private Rogers. We’ve gotten very close to arranging this international commission, thanks to Secretary Martinez and, while I don’t think he knew how helpful he was being in our regard by intentionally involving Private Rogers in his liaising, Captain Barnes. The leakage of today’s footage also helped—’ 

 

‘Leakage?’ Pepper echoed, having not checked the news since Steve was arrested. She’d waited nervously for the doctors to say he was thru the worst of it, for him to wake up, scrolling over her budget reports; she had figured the PR head would have a two-page summary on the first newsday’s reaction to the arrest for her in the morning. She had not assumed Attorney General Chen would come to see her; she could not have conceived when she woke up that she would be a party in this clandestine meeting in an empty procedure room off Mount Sinai's ICU ward. 

 

‘The interrogation today,’ Chen replied. She grinned, her small, sloe eyes crinkling hugely at the corners. ‘Someone in the police department leaked a section of the footage. It is not some HYDRA crone you see in the video they leaked; you see a scared man who looks like any other veteran who saw horrors like his. You see on the tape someone who needs comfort and you see state officers mock him while he audibly struggles to breathe. While I feel horribly that he had this experience, and while I should hope you would pass along to Private Rogers my sympathies and regrets, I am grateful for the public imagery it has given us.’ 

 

‘I understand; I will,’ Pepper said. She did understand the relief it was for something to sway public opinion. Pepper also understood that all the HYDRA files detailing Steve’s torture, while publicly available, were sanitized, scientific versions of what happened; they didn’t describe a human being. They described experiments, procedure, and an asset or unit, not waterboarding or isolation of a foreign soldier. The files were dense and difficult to understand, and most of the public files were written in Russian or Korean or Chinese or French or Arabic or Urdu. 

 

Leaked, contemporary footage, in high-definition courtesy of the New York state department, of an actual human actually suffering did create a very different image. It was a good, terrible one which would help them protect Steve from a misplaced mass sense of vengeance or justice. Even Bucky would understand, when he came back from Poland and met with Chen himself. 

 

‘The arrest at a charity event, the leaked footage, Rogers leaving the station in an ambulance, all of these terrible things may shift enough public opinion to gather us the final few senators and congresswomen we need,’ Secretary Martinez told her. ‘Many countries want to know what happened, as badly as they want HYDRA gone. The world is afraid; it saw three guns which would have controlled us all barely brought out of the sky. The world wants to get to the bottom of this and most countries think understanding Rogers’s experience, not determining his guilt, is going to key to understanding how this conspiracy went on for so long and so successfully.’

 

‘If the world wants a truth commission, then the United States of America needs to participate in order for it to happen,’ Senator Palmer added, giving Pepper a bit of a coy smile. Her teeth flashed from behind her plum grin. ‘If our efforts, and the less-politically-bound, _non-governmental_ efforts of your PR department, Miss Potts, could control the news cycle around Rogers’ arrest this week, there will be enough public pressure to force a majority senators and congresswomen to join us. That’s why Miss Malone, from the Federal Defenders of New York, is here.’ She nodded kindly at Miss Malone, who flushed pink and nervously stuck out a hand for Pepper to shake. 

 

‘Sorry, we didn’t, um, I met everyone else when the nurse went to fetch you,’ Miss Malone said nervously. 

 

‘It’s great to meet you,’ Pepper said sincerely. Miss Malone flushed just slightly. 

 

‘Oh, I’m a little starstruck to be here with all you,’ Miss Malone said sincerely, as tho she were not much better suited to stand in this room than Pepper the accidental CEO. She had no illusions about her talent; she was perhaps literally the best person in the world to run a company like Stark Industries. That being said, she had fallen into her position. She had been interested in creative solutions, in fixing unique interpersonal and functional communicative problems. She’d went to Stark Industries knowing it was a year’s contract. She hadn’t meant to stay, but her first job at the company had challenged every part of her and they transferred her to Tony’s personal staff from the Silicon office when her contract was up, with an exorbitant salary. The rest was history; she hadn’t intentionally clawed her way to the top like all of these other women. She'd been trying to go somewhere else when Tony’s chaos showed her how to sail.

 

‘I’m the other half of the PR spin team,’ Malone explained. ‘I have been very present in the commission's process since the beginning. I wasn’t approached by the Captain or by Private Rogers; I just knew it was right and that my organization had the clout to make the difference. I know what PR goals are essential, which will be helpful, and which are pipe dreams. I know what I and my resources can do. We have—all of us—come here today to ask you and your resources to do the rest. With the right maneuvering we can dominate the news cycle with only the footage that has already been released—’

 

'Protecting Rogers from further interviews or cameras,' Secretary Martinez said. 'There are twenty minutes of the full length footage; CNN would have been content for weeks with five.' 

 

'If we dominate the cycle, then we can get this commission off the ground,' Miss Malone finished. 'We've been working incredibly hard; I won't lie. So has Captain Barnes. We're quite close.' 

 

Pepper blinked at miss Malone for a moment. Perhaps she did have an illusion about her position; the idea that these people were coming to her for her power made her head swim. Her power was less fettered than theirs; she could pull strings public servants had to pretend to be above. 

 

‘Thank you, ladies,’ she said. ‘Miss Malone, it seems you and I are in control of this message now. Shall we head to my office?’ 

 

‘Ma’am?’ Miss Malone echoed. Attorney General Chen grinned, catlike and charming, next to Pepper. 

 

‘I just need to fetch my shoes,’ Pepper said. ‘But then I think it’s past time to get started.’ 

 

^^^

 

‘So what does that mean?’ Bucky asked, running the pieces together in his head. Steve had been arrested pretty publicly, hauled roughly into a police van, and interviewed about three assassinations, but he hadn’t officially been charged by the time Herieth had the arrest warrant declared a violation. Steve had been released and the investigation was frozen not dropped, which was another thing Bucky didn’t understand. Five hours had been just enough time for Steve’s asthma, triggered by something and then stressed and left untreated, to land him in the ER. Bucky had wanted, so badly in the break between the Gdańsk strike and the first of three rural bunker strikes, to talk to Steve, hear his voice, hear that he was all right. 

 

Bucky had called in a spare moment before cleanup, while he changed from tattered battle gear. Pepper had answered because Steve couldn’t possibly. She told him that things were going to be fine, but she hadn’t known that Bucky could hear the sounds of the doctors behind her. He had wanted to hear Steve’s voice and instead he could make out the sound of his lungs tightening to a whistle. 

 

‘These are eight cases from four states,’ Steve said, loosely answering. It was a bad day. This bad day was worse than the ones Steve had been having recently. Bucky had rejoiced, recently, because of how often Steve was having good days; to hear disjointed thoughts bubbling out again felt like cupping hot coals in his palms. ‘Twelve murders. I killed twelve people in places I barely remember.’

 

‘You were a prisoner of war,’ Bucky corrected. ‘It's not the same thing. The law is pretty clear on that.’ He wanted to say it was a good sign that the prosecutors were overreaching, that if they charged him with too-big charges, they made it that much easier for themselves to lose. He knew saying that to Steve would make him crazy. 

 

‘I just—I think I’m _guilty_ , Buck,’ Steve told him. ‘I don’t think there’s any way around it. I killed these people. My hands did these things. I can see it in the pieces in my head, and they—there's blood, and sometimes— _ya chuvstvuyu_ —’ Bucky recognized Russian from the verbs he had learned from Natasha, but before he could cut in in his own shaky Russian to tell Steve he couldn’t understand, Steve stumbled and returned to English. ‘I feel the trigger pull and it happened. It _happened_ ,’ Steve insisted; it wasn’t all he had said in Russian, but Bucky didn’t need specifics.

 

‘I know it did,’ Bucky said uselessly. He always tried to soothe the streams of panic coming from Steve in times like this, but he couldn't tell if Steve could even hear him thru the cloudy static of his memories. 

 

‘I saw this little girl’s teddy bear,’ Steve told him. ‘I can see—they showed me the body—I saw—It was me.'

 

'You didn't have a choice,' Bucky pointed out. ‘It wasn't you.’

 

'I chose to stop on the carrier,' Steve said. It was a very obvious reply; relief rushed thru the tiniest section of Bucky’s tense shoulders at the promise that Steve was still firmly in the present, on the phone with him. ‘I could have stopped. I stopped; I should’ve stopped.’ 

 

‘You _resisted your programming_ on the helicarrier,’ Bucky corrected. ‘I saw what happened. HYDRA let your surgical maintenance lapse by less than a day and you healed enough to resist.’

 

‘It wasn't about choice,’ Bucky promised. ‘When someone burns out the sections of your brain designed to make choices, you can’t make them. You can’t be blamed—’

 

‘It’s not even about blame,’ Steve said. ‘It’s justice. Those people I murdered don’t get justice because I— _what_ , I _lie_ and say I didn’t do it? I shouldn’t lie about that.’ 

 

‘You _didn’t_ do it,’ Bucky repeated, for the millionth time in his life.

 

'I did it.' 

 

‘HYDRA did. The asset was a weapon; _Steve Rogers_ was frozen and cauterised beneath it.’

 

‘It was me,’ Steve insisted. 

 

‘Your body, yeah,’ Bucky agreed. ‘But you weren’t controlling it, Stevie; they were.’ 

 

‘No, I remember— _I_ killed those people,’ Steve went on. ‘Maybe I didn't really have a choice. I know I didn't want to. But I did. I don't know if I should pay. I didn't want to kill them and I couldn't not, but I did. I saw it. Don't I have to admit I did it?’

 

‘No,’ Bucky said easily. ‘No, Steve, of course not.’ He couldn’t believe, after all this time, Steve didn’t know that he couldn't be blamed for HYDRA, not if Bucky wasn’t to be blamed for his failure to stop them seventy years ago. Steve had been stripped of anything that made him human; he had been their weapon. Weapons didn’t choose. Weapons were aimed. 

 

‘I think—’ Steve said, trailing off. ‘ _Ah_ , fuck,’ he cursed, audibly moving the phone away from his ear.

 

‘Steve?’ Bucky called. He heard a man’s voice—he was nearly certain it was Sam’s—asking if he was all right. ‘ _Steve_ ,’ Bucky sighed again, uselessly. He could dimly hear Steve insisting he was fine. Steve didn’t sound all right, not even when his voice was too distant across the line to really make out. 

 

‘What about—’ Steve started, suddenly coming back to the phone. ‘Um, what about the people who didn’t know? They didn’t even know, but they paid for it already.’ Bucky frowned, repeating the words in his head. 

 

‘What people?’ Bucky wondered. 

 

‘ _Other_ people,’ Steve said, like Bucky was an idiot. ‘I did it, but no one knew. Other people went to jail, Bucky,’ Steve said desperately. Bucky realised Steve had been counting the wrongfully convicted among the victims of HYDRA’s madness. He wondered how different the numbers became if you considered the families and indirect victims and those who had fallen for nothing. ‘I mean, decades—They spent their lives in there and I did it. It was me and I did that to them too, because I didn’t stop it.’ 

 

‘Steve, Jesus—’ Bucky began, before Steve tried to cut him off. 

 

‘No, if I had—’

 

‘Stevie, listen. Do you know where you are?’ Bucky asked, cutting him off. 

 

‘I—’ Steve began. Bucky could imagine Steve glancing over his surroundings, wherever he was in Avengers Tower, wherever in their apartment he had holed up after JARVIS placed the unit into lockdown for the night. ‘Um, I'm—I don’t know.’ 

 

‘You’re in our house, right? Our apartment in the Tower. Do you know who you’ve got here?’ Bucky pressed. ‘You know me.’ 

 

‘Yeah,’ Steve croaked. Bucky could feel him nodding across the line in the silence, trying to find Bucky’s name. ‘Yeah. Bucky. I know. I _know_ , OK?’ he snapped. It weirdly made Bucky want to laugh; Steve sounded so much like himself when he was pridefully averring a lie about his proximity to good health. ‘’M not, ‘m not _deficient_.’ 

 

‘I know that,’ Bucky said. ‘I know, Steve. But you don’t know where you are right now. You’re better now, right?’ Bucky wondered how much pain Steve was in, or if he was just upset, overwhelmed by embodying emotion he hadn’t been able to feel for so long. He wished he were there. He couldn’t believe the prosecutors had made their move at a charity event. He couldn’t believe Tony’s well-deserved good press for the creation of an amazingly cheap and advanced prosthetic would be lost in the wave of sensationalist journalism implicating and smearing a recovering prisoner of war. If he were honest, he couldn’t stand people maligning the man he loved so dearly and ardently. He couldn’t stand people who saw Steve’s return to himself, partial and different as he was now, as anything less than a miracle. Even if Bucky could understand those who wanted punishment for him, he couldn’t understand how they didn’t see HYDRA’s torture as punishment enough. He didn’t know how living with the scars of what had happened to him and what he had been forced to do wasn’t enough of a purgatory for the man Bucky had once known. 

 

‘This is you better,’ Bucky pointed out. ‘But you’re lost right now, matoki; I can tell. How can you be guilty of murder when you get lost like this?’ 

 

‘’M not lost,’ Steve snapped, lying. ‘I know—Don’t talk at me like I’m stupid; I’m not stupid. What about the ones who made me kill people and are presidents now? What if our president—What then?’

 

‘It’s OK to be scared, if that’s what this—’ Bucky tried. 

 

‘Fuck you,’ Steve said gently, inarticulate. Bucky recognized it as a defense mechanism learned from Tony, when he, Rhodey and Bucky shouted at each other over card games. Tony usually shouted it at them while red in the face; Steve said it quietly here, trying to make Bucky shut up and listen. He listened. ‘No, you’re—I’m _guilty_. Maybe I couldn’t have stopped it, but at the end of the day, it was me who did it.’

 

‘Steve, all this shit was done to you as much as it was to anyone else,’ Bucky insisted. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t plan it. You didn’t arm yourself. You didn’t even know who you were then.’

 

‘The reason you're so sure I shouldn't pay is the same reason everyone else will think I should,’ Steve said after a silence in which Bucky searched every corner of his mind for something else to say, for what would convince Steve that he wasn’t to blame for the programme someone had shattered him in order to install. 

 

‘What reason?’ Bucky asked, confused. 

 

‘Love,’ Steve replied simply. Bucky felt like he’d been punched in the jaw. ‘I killed someone they loved.’

 

‘Steve,’ he tried, but his voice broke off all its own. He sounded choked and ruined. He pressed a fist against his mouth to stop his words. Steve was right; the reason Bucky needed so badly for the world to see Steve wasn’t to blame was the same reason he was in the cold bunker in the first place. HYDRA was evil, yes, but Bucky himself got involved because of Steve. They had _hurt_ Steve and he wanted them to be stopped, to pay for it. He wanted HYDRA to _pay_ for everything they’d stolen from them, from Steve. They had taken decades of Christmases and Purims and _hope_ ; they had stolen and ripped away and destroyed so much and Bucky wanted them to pay for it. 

 

‘Don’t cry,’ Steve begged. ‘I’m sorry. I'm so sorry; don’t cry.’

 

‘Don’t be sorry,’ Bucky managed. ‘I'm not crying. This isn’t your fault; I just—’ 

 

‘I _am_ sorry,’ Steve insisted. ‘Because I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I'm sorry. I’m supposed to enter a plea in a few days and I think I’m guilty. I’m guilty.’ 

 

‘Don’t—Don’t say that,’ Bucky whispered. He didn’t know if Steve could hear him, over the line. His voice was weaker than he wanted it but he didn’t know how to possibly speak any stronger past the sharpstone in his throat.

 

‘It’s true,’ Steve said. ‘I did my best but it—Ow. _Ow_.’ 

 

‘You OK?’ Bucky asked. 

 

‘I don’t—Ah, _ow_ ,’ Steve said, his voice breaking off. Bucky heard a clatter, like the phone had been dropped. He shifted where he stood. 

 

‘Steve?’ he called. He couldn’t make out words, too tinny over his bad service and Steve's dropped-and-muffled phone, but he could hear Sam’s voice, and someone else’s. He heard Steve’s too, panicked and frantic. The other two voices were soothing and the woman—probably Doctor Nguyen—moved further away with Steve. After a minute, someone picked up the phone from wherever Steve had dropped it. 

 

‘Bucky?’ 

 

‘Hey, Sam,’ Bucky said. He cleared his throat. Sam proved again he was a good friend by not mentioning how wrecked Bucky sounded. ‘Hey, what happened?’ 

 

‘Same thing that’s been happening since the arrest,’ Sam explained. ‘He’s in pain like we’re back at day one. He dropped the phone; Melissa’s taken him to calm down. The cops showed him a lot of very specific evidence and he’s been trying to place it all in his memory.’

 

‘They showed him—?’ Bucky echoed. He swallowed around the sharp sensation of bile. 

 

‘Photos, mostly,’ Sam replied. That was unspecific and sent another scrape of worry down Bucky’s spine. Sam continued, honest, ‘He's not well. The judge remanded him to Doctor Nguyen's custody until Herieth can sort out the rest of this. Melissa’s with him now.’ 

 

‘He’s lost like this because of—what? _Photos_? And they think he should be charged for what happened? They think he can handle—?’ Bucky ranted, terrified.

 

‘I know, man,’ Sam interrupted, trying to calm Bucky down. ‘I know. Breathe.’ Bucky did as Sam said, hauling in almost too much air in a desperate gulp. ‘It’s gonna be fine.’ 

 

‘Sam, he’s gonna plead guilty,’ Bucky said. Saying it out loud made it feel too real, too risky, too pig-headed, and stubborn, and stupid, and _righteous_ , and idiotic, and risky, and _of fucking course_ Steve would plead guilty. He couldn’t remember to eat five meals a day; he would let his pseudo-supersoldier serum metabolism cannibalize him entirely if Bucky or Pepper or Nat or, frankly, JARVIS didn’t keep an eye on him. He couldn’t find his way around the neighbourhoods he’d grown up in, let alone the alien, new parts of the city; he wasn’t stable enough to face trial, in Bucky’s opinion,or those of his doctors. He wasn’t OK, God damn it, and he was gonna plead guilty and the people out for blood would kill him. 

 

‘We aren’t going to let that happen,’ Sam promised. ‘It’s not even gonna come to that, man. It’s really not. He’s not guilty; he’s a victim in this and we see that, even if he can’t.’ 

 

‘Don’t let him plead guilty, Sam,’ Bucky begged, suddenly too terrified of losing Steve again. ‘Please, I can’t—If I lose him again, I’m not gonna survive it. I can’t believe I’m so far away. How am I not there right now? How am I not there with him?’ 

 

‘It’s all right,’ Sam soothed. ‘Bucky, take a breath, all right?’ Bucky breathed. He closed his eyes and focused on Sam’s voice. ‘I can't imagine how hard it is to be so far away right now, but he’s not going to plead guilty. I don’t think he’s going to get the chance to plead guilty; I don’t think the prosecutors will get that far. Pepper’s been working round the clock with some lady from the Federal Defenders—’ 

 

‘He thinks he’s going away,’ Bucky pointed out, unable to hear logical comfort. 

 

‘I know,’ Sam agreed. ‘And if I had been talked to by those cops the way he was, I would think so too. He doesn’t watch the news anymore; he doesn’t know that there isn’t a lot of talk of him going away. Rhodey says there’s buzz at the White House that the charges are going to be dropped against him and refiled as criminal negligence federally against the Congressional committee which confirmed Pierce in 1991 as a Security Council member.’ 

 

‘Jesus,’ Bucky cursed. ‘What’s Rhodey on about?’

 

‘I don’t really know,’ Sam admitted. ‘He’s been busy, hasn’t even come by; Tony passed it along. And you haven’t seen the news. Sections of the interrogation video were leaked; it must’ve been horrible for Steve, but public opinion was sure swayed by it.’ 

 

‘Is Rhodey using that at the White House?’ Bucky asked. 

 

‘I really don’t know,’ Sam said, regretfully. ‘Hey, an aide from the Polish embassy called, asked if I could set up a meeting with the Ambassador and Steve. Time he wants is before you get back.’ 

 

‘Which aid called?’ Bucky asked. 

 

‘Badlak.’ 

 

‘Yeah,’ Bucky said heavily. ‘Yeah, if you can sit in with him, set it up; Badlak’s a friend. He’s good with Steve.’ 

 

‘They’ve met?’ Sam wondered. 

 

‘Yeah, Steve helps set up cell strikes, when he’s well,’ Bucky agreed, explaining. He shifted his weight, cold despite himself. ‘How is he, Sam? Really.’ 

 

‘Well, I’m not a therapist; I'm a former soldier and former group facilitator,’ Sam hedged.

 

‘I know that; sorry.’ 

 

‘So as a friend, I don’t know,’ Sam went on. ‘I guess I’m not more worried about him than I usually am.’ 

 

‘All right,’ Bucky said. He sighed heavily, unable to help himself. ‘Give him—give him a hug from me, or something, yeah? Just—Yeah.’ 

 

‘It’s gonna be all right, man, really,’ Sam promised. ‘Pepper’s got something in the works with Chen—’ 

 

‘Attorney General Chen is finally able to speak on this issue and I’m out of the country?’ Bucky demanded, interrupting. His worry for Steve aside, that sent a spike of annoyance thru him. 

 

‘Yeah, apparently she’s aware of the irony that,’ Sam promised. ‘I requested an extra guard for the synagogue this Saturday because of the press—can you imagine a camera getting into Steve’s service?—and now Badlak’s come calling too. Steve’s doing well, really, considering all that’s going on, so just finish strong in Poland; get those ducks in a row, and then come home. It’s all gonna be all right.’ 

 

‘You’re sure?’ Bucky asked. He hated feeling pulled in two different directions. 

 

‘Yeah,’ Sam promised. ‘I’m full-time the next few days, all right? VA’s been kicking up a fuss about the interrogation video; the cops really crossed a few lines. I’ve got twenty-four-hour call and time-and-a-half to keep an eye out.’

 

‘Good,’ Bucky grumbled. Sam laughed. ‘I’ve been pissing off every major name in HYDRA’s book for the last few months, Sam,’ Bucky added, feeling a bit defensive, and perhaps unfairly so. ‘People might not know how much or what, but they know he means something to me. Yeah, I want someone as capable as you looking out.’ 

 

‘I’m not laughing at you,’ Sam assured him. ‘I just knew you’d think that. Me, I’m bored as shit because he sleeps a lot when his asthma’s bad, and I’ve been in this apartment on call for thirty-six hours now.’ 

 

‘Yeah, well, feel free to the fridge,’ Bucky said. ‘And be thankful. He used to get pneumonia and almost die when the asthma was bad. Now he just gets cranky. You ask Tony for anything—’

 

‘Oh, he’s been around, being generous and emotionally stunted; it’s been great,’ Sam said. ‘It’s weird getting to know him. He’s not like his whole brand suggests.’ 

 

‘How do you mean?’ Bucky asked, letting Sam’s chatter distract him from his worry about Steve. He knew Sam was small-talking on purpose; he let it distract him. He could feel Sam shrug over the line. 

 

‘He bumbles,’ Sam told him, like it was a big secret. ‘I wouldn’t have thought Tony Stark was a bumbler. You don’t notice it while it’s happening, because he’s, you know, _Tony Stark_ , but he bumbles. He loses track of what he’s saying, midsentence.’ 

 

‘You know, I wouldn’t say it to Tony, but his dad did the same thing,’ Bucky said. ‘They’re big thinkers; they bumble when they have new ideas pop up, so they bumble a lot.’

 

‘Why wouldn’t you say that to him?’ Sam asked. ‘That’s nice.’ 

 

‘Nah, he didn’t get to know his father as the Howard I tell stories about,’ Bucky said. ‘I don’t think Howard came home from the war, not really. I don’t think—I mean, they dropped the _Bomb_ , you know?’ 

 

‘Yeah,’ Sam agreed absently. 

 

‘Twice,’ Bucky emphasized. ‘You don’t come back from that. He couldn’t have been the man I had known, not when he came home. HYDRA convinced him to help them torture people and destroy the world. He was hard on his kid and he was afraid of the world. I don’t think it would be easy for Tony to know he reminds me of who his father was before the war. I don’t think it’d be easy to know his dad must’ve seen it too.’ 

 

‘That’s some heavy shit, brother,’ Sam said frankly. Bucky nodded. 

 

‘Yeah, it feels like everything’s pretty heavy lately, man,’ Bucky said. ‘I should probably make time for group more often than I do.’ 

 

‘Yes,’ Sam agreed. Silence filled the line for a moment. ‘Helene’s wedding was amazing, by the way,’ he went on. Bucky hadn’t gone, too afraid to draw attention to the wrong part of Helene’s wedding at the public venue, but Sam had snapchatted surreptitiously thruout the ceremony and it had been beautiful. Helene’s wife had pinned her black hair up into this tangle of curls and Helene had been her contrast with her buzzed and fuzzy scalp; they had both looked radiant, even in the low-quality snaps. He listened to Sam talk for a long while, letting it calm him. 

 

^^^

 

Bucky was glad for the thickness of his gloves as he brushed cobwebs from the covers of film reels. The base that had fallen that day was remote and stockpiled full of weaponry, physical files, and film reels. The underground room was perhaps six hundred square feet, but the shelves and shelves and shelves of film reel were unnerving. Bucky wondered what fucking horrors lay recorded here in true fascist style, as if what horror was done was so objectively fine. He was thankful for the gloves; he felt sick enough without tacky, silky tangles sticking to his fingerprints. He wished he were out of Poland; he wished he could have left the strike when Steve had been arrested. He wished he didn’t have to stand in a room filled with film and bear witness to the evidence of annihilation.

 

If he were honest with himself, he didn’t know if he would have been confident enough to leave Poland before the strike he planned was done. He didn’t have much right to be in Poland leading a quasi-military strike; this government agreed that his big, unconfirmed, multinational plan was better than a real war of any size; a lot of countries had good people filling in gaps of his big plans. A lot of good people were making things happen. He didn’t know if Captain America could leave them for Steve. 

 

‘Wow,’ Clint mused from behind Bucky, eyeing other shelves. ‘All of this hardcopy. Makes you wonder how much isn’t already online.’ Bucky barely heard him, for all his words carried a significant weight, because he was staring at a specific line of film boxes. 

 

‘SGR,’ he read aloud. The tape’s full label read: _SGR51.08.11.L+08.13.B_. The sequences were widely varied but always marked: _SGR, SGR, SGR, SGR_. He pulled his hand away from the dusty webs he’d been swiping at. He wished, selfishly, that he’d stopped at the scant nine RYK reels, that he hadn’t seen what came next. 

 

‘What?’ Clint asked, turning to glance around Bucky’s shoulder. He squinted to read something so close. ‘SGR?’ 

 

‘Those are his initials,’ Bucky said. ‘Steve’s, I mean.’ Clint shot him a quick, coy look. Bucky wondered if Natasha had told him: if when she’d outed Bucky in her spy reports, she’d told her best friend too. Bucky had never said anything to Clint, but the man had been around their home often enough; Clint had seen Steve on bad days, curled up and sometimes accepting comfort. He’d seen them on good days, when Steve smiled at Bucky like he used to. Surely Clint knew. ‘HYDRA wouldn’t be so obvious, right?’ Bucky said; these three letter codes had to be code, were secret, were something else. He wasn’t staring at video evidence of Steve’s torture; he couldn’t be. He reached up and pulled _SGR51.08.11.L+08.13.B_ from the shelf, then pulled the reel case from the cardstock box. 

 

‘Dunno,’ Clint said unhelpfully. Bucky sighed, turning to glance up the aisle of the stacks. 

 

‘Lau!’ he called. ‘Taylor Lau,’ he clarified, when two people turned. ‘Let’s get the recovery teams in here, yeah? See if the Canadians can send Wiesel to supervise, or Bagley.’ Taylor Lau scurried off. ‘I wanna watch one of these,’ he told Clint, holding _SGR51.08.11.L+08.13.B_ up determinedly. His stomach shrunk at the idea but he needed to know. He eyed the number codes behind Steve’s initials. 

 

He waited for Wiesel, but eventually Bagely came. She was an obstinate professional; he barely started to walk her thru his expectation of information recovery protocols before she understood.

 

‘I’ll make sure you’re updated every half hour,’ she finished, having taken over the plan. He nodded, satisfied. 

 

‘I also want to watch something; is there a way to do that?’ he asked.

 

‘I’ll have someone take you to a projector room, sir,’ she said. ‘There are two in this bunker; one is a surgical chamber and one is a small viewing room.’ 

 

‘Set me up in the viewing room please,’ he requested. She nodded, snapping out of parade rest. 

 

‘Man, you sure you wanna do this?’ Clint asked him, looking a bit skeptical. Bucky sighed. He couldn’t help but shake his head. 

 

‘They recorded it,’ Bucky said. ‘This is—This is evidence, maybe _the_ evidence, of how they programmed him. It isn’t anywhere else.’

 

‘Did you look?’ Clint asked. Bucky brushed away more dust and the web from the shelves of the abandoned record hall. If the numbers were dates—which seemed too likely for them to not be—the videos started nine days after Steve fell. Bucky realised HYDRA must have recovered Steve almost immediately. He really should have sent a team after the body; they might have found him, or found the trail to him. There was a huge gap after the first few tapes, after Bucky crashed his plane and America bombed Japan; Bucky’s treacherous mind reminded him the months-long gap in footage was probably when they kept Steve in isolation. Bucky swallowed the coppery taste of anxiety in his mouth. 

 

‘I—I did,’ Bucky admitted. ‘I mean, I know what they did to him; I’ve seen his brain scans and his X-Rays. He’s talked about some of it, but there aren’t any of his records. Any of them, even his enlistment files: I can’t find them. The references to the Winter Soldier’s maintenance are so oblique in what the SHIELD dump contained; people have no idea what he went thru and they should.’ 

 

‘I don’t think you should watch this, man,’ Clint said. ‘If Laura had—’ 

 

‘No, Clint,’ Bucky interrupted. ‘No, I feel like I have to.’ 

 

‘It’s a bad idea,’ Clint repeated. Bucky huffed a laugh. 

 

‘Most things I do end up being bad ideas,’ Bucky admitted. 

 

‘I know what that’s like,’ Clint agreed. ‘I tried to retile the bathroom without any help.’ 

 

‘Yeah? How’d that go?’ Bucky laughed. He pulled two other reels at random, for good measure. 

 

‘’Bout as well as you’d expect,’ Clint said frankly. 

 

‘That bad, huh?’ Bucky asked, and a data recovery officer, Kasprzak, appeared to lead them to a viewing room in the bunker. 

 

‘ _The sound won’t be very loud, if this machine still works_ ,’ the technician warned in her easy German. Bucky had met her several times thruout the Poland strikes and they communicated more smoothly in German than Polish or English. ‘ _I’ll see what I can do, sir._ ’ She crouched by the table, and Bucky put the three reels he’d grabbed on the table. He wouldn’t watch all of them, but he’d like the tech to choose his poison. 

 

The video flickered in the projector. It was, like everything they found in HYDRA bases in Eastern Europe, oddly familiar and futuristic all at once: black-and-white, sound unlike what Bucky had known, better quality than the propaganda reels the Commandos had shot twice during the war, far better than the newsreels that were filmed anytime they were planning on base. Steve, hair gummed about his ears, lay bound in something far too similar to Bucky's vita-ray charmer when he transformed. Steve's face was obscured even thru the little window by a mask and series of tubes, pumping medicated air into his lungs, warming him up and keeping him docile. White men in white coats swarmed, two with clipboards and the other standing on a little dais to peer thru the glass at the frozen, dead face below. 

 

The video cut when the cryochamber’s draining was completed, when Steve started to blink and panic behind the glass window and the heavy mask. 

 

There were three blank frames before nine seconds of footage: Steve staring into the distance while a straight razor cut thru his hair. His skull—he looked so _thin_ —bobbed uselessly on his neck, tugged this way and that as someone yanked and hacked at his hair. Blood spattered his shoulder in small amounts from small cuts. Steve didn’t react. Neither did the would-be barber. 

 

The film cut again: three blank frames and then more footage.

 

Bucky had learned a little bit of Russian from Natasha and from Clint since Steve had come back. It felt like part of Steve now, part of his history and therefore something Bucky had to love; besides that, when Steve’s brain wasn’t firing well, he got caught in certain languages and Russian was perhaps the most common one. It was a big help to be able to understand Steve when he couldn’t understand Bucky. 

 

He didn’t understand the doctor standing in front the lens, droning. Bucky picked out the occasional set of numbers. He imagined at least some were Steve’s vitals. They’d clearly done a brain surgery between testing and whatever this was; Bucky thanked God those scenes were on another tape, under some other alphabetical code than B or L. When the video opened on Steve again, staring ahead but distinctly not making eye contact with either the handlers chattering behind the camera or with the lens itself. His head was newly shaven and lines of fresh sutures painted his skull like the shrapnel scars which lined his face. A broad, bulky man dressed in dark scrubs stood behind Steve, like a hypermasculine shadow. The frame was wider. They could see more than just bare shoulders; they could see all of Steve’s thin chest. Bucky realised Steve's arm was missing, not even the silver prosthetic attached to him, just a stump with pure, white gauze encasing the shoulder now gilded in metal. 

 

‘ _What’s your name?_ ’ in Russian, the man directly behind the camera asked. 

 

‘ _I don’t have one_ ,’ Steve replied mechanically, his accent identical to his handler’s and just as thick. 

 

‘What is your name?’ another handler asked, in clunky English, drawing Steve's eye. Steve's thin chest gave away easily that his breath was coming harder from fear. He shook his head. 

 

‘ _I don't think—I don't speak English_ ,’ Steve managed. He looked away, jerkily, like it hurt.

 

‘What's your name?’ the handler repeated. Steve hesitated. The man in scrubs shifted his weight. Bucky's spine shrunk and froze at the implication; Steve didn't seem to know what was coming. He sat perfectly still. 

 

‘What's your name?’ the handler pressed. Bucky saw Steve search for the answer, panicked that he didn’t know. He was still a person, deep down; the test proved that. 

 

‘I don't remember,’ Steve said, lapsing. The man in scrubs moved suddenly, bringing his arm up and back down, striking something _hard_ across Steve's back. A crack broke too loud from the worn-sound of the film reel. Steve's eyes snapped shut; he hunched his shoulders and whimpered. The man whipped again—it was a thin, leather-wrapped cane—and this time Steve stayed quiet, writhing horribly at the impact, the worst, _slightest_ twist away from something awful. His head ducked to hide his face. Bucky knew the gesture now as an effective one; Steve’s long hair hid him from view easily when he wanted to cower and feel safe. His head was bare now and the effort to hide was pathetic. 

 

‘Who are you?’ the handler asked again. 

 

‘ _I don't speak English_ ,’ Steve said, his voice cracked with fear or pain. The handlers started the test again, satisfied only for a moment, circling thru the questions like sharks. They demanded in Russian and pressed Steve longer and longer in his native language. He wasn’t restrained; Bucky couldn’t help but notice that. His only hand clenched on his knee, and every muscle in his ribbed chest was tense, but nothing held him on the small bench but whatever they’d already done to him.

 

‘ _I don’t speak any English; please stop, I don’t understand_ ,’ he begged, fluent in Russian, an accent different than the one he spoke in now. The orderly behind him hit him harder at that, for asking for mercy. Steve was hit hard enough to make him cry out again, and again, and again, until it was too much for him to even cry out, sitting and waiting for the next blow; Bucky swallowed roughly and asked the technician to move them to a new section. She adjusted the reel immediately. Clint watched him carefully. 

 

‘There’s other stuff we should be—’ Clint tried, making to get up. The film started again. 

 

‘I just—’ Bucky said. ‘It’s fine. A few minutes.’ He propped his elbow on the table, hiding his mouth behind a loose fist. The technician was a professional; she didn’t openly watch the film or them, too aware of the weight of Bucky’s gaze to intrude on it. The video cut and changed angles to time how long the whipped gashes took to heal, filming Steve’s back as nurses rinsed blood from his skin and doctors began peeling gauze blackened-by-blood-on-film away to—to check the progress of their skeletal replacement, Bucky realised. 

 

‘ _I’ll see what else is here_ ,’ Kasprzak said kindly before Bucky could ask. She moved the reel along again but stopped the video entirely—so the projector darkened and the overhead lights came back on—when the next film section was from a surgical procedure, drilling loudly into Steve’s open shoulder. Bucky had enough; he couldn’t watch it. He stood. Clint leapt to his feet. Bucky swallowed again, tasting acid. 

 

‘ _Sorry; thank you_ ,’ Bucky fumbled. He couldn’t meet her eye. ‘I, uh. Thank you. _Please make sure the SGR films are boxed and given to Sergeant Borowski,_ ’ Bucky told the technician. She nodded easily. 

 

‘ _I’ll make sure they’re catalogued myself_ ,’ she promised him. She shook his hand warmly. 

 

Outside the projector room, Bucky took a moment to gather himself. Clint waited kindly, not staring or hovering, just close enough for Bucky to feel his support. He felt like his body was made of magnets like everything was drawing in and was too much. He felt like he might shake and fly apart, into pieces too tiny to ever reconnect. 

 

‘You were right,’ he told Clint, because credit where credit was due. ‘That was a bad idea.’ 


	2. i will find you

'Well, I’ll be,' someone said. Steve leapt to his feet, turning nervously towards the other set of doors in the Mural Room. The President stood there, buttoning his jacket as he made his way over to Steve. 'As it turns out, none of the Howling Commandos died during World War Two, huh?' he said, joking rather informally. Steve didn’t know what to make of that.

'No, sir,' Steve replied. President Ellis stuck out his hand. Steve shook it. 'It’s an honour to meet you, Mister President,' he said, because one couldn’t shake the President’s hand for the first time without saying that. President Ellis had the perfect politician’s smile; Steve was sure the smile in response to his pleasantry was rote, maybe even polite, but it sure looked warm and sincere. The President was taller than him, like most men were, but something about the height disparity in this room, in this building, made Steve feel very small indeed. The President clapped him warmly on his left shoulder, familiar, making Steve tense against his will. He saw the flick of the President’s eyes to the hard, metal shoulder. The motors gave a little whine at the unexpected contact; Steve thought it might be too quiet for the President to hear. The reflex shifting of the plates caught at the cotton of the tee shirt Steve wore; with Tony’s new nerve system, he could feel himself constantly ripping at his clothes. With Tony’s new nerve system, he could feel himself destroying without his control. He wondered if the President could feel the plates shifting under his palm too.

'As I said to Captain Barnes a few years ago: welcome back,' the President said. He released Steve.

'Thank you, sir,' Steve said. 'It’s good to be home.'

'I’m sure.' The President sat, and gestured for Steve to do the same. 'Please.' Steve sat.

President Ellis regarded him, simply taking stock, it seemed. Steve resisted the urge to look away, to indicate his submissiveness; it was beginning to feel like that need to avoid eye contact which the programming had left in him would never really go away. President Ellis’s navy suit was as fine as anything Tony would wear. The little flag pin on his lapel was perfectly straight. The Secret Service had picked Steve up on short notice that morning and hadn’t even let Sam come; he had been on his way with Sam to therapy with Mel and he was dressed for that, not for meeting the President. He felt foolish, even if he supposed it didn’t really matter that he was wearing a tee shirt and one of Bucky’s grey cardigans, informal and almost embarrassingly overlarge. He pulled the sleeve over his metal hand out of habit, hiding the prosthetic from view. He circled his hand around his metal wrist over the soft, machine-woven-thin wool of his sleeve. The President eyed the movement; Steve regretted the nervous gesture as his flesh hand betrayed his shake.

'You look nervous,' President Ellis said eventually.

'Yes, sir,' Steve agreed.

'Are you nervous?' the President asked.

'Yes, sir.' Steve thought that much should be obvious.

'Why?' the President pressed. He leaned back in the mahogany-framed chair, crossing his legs at the knee. Steve kept his feet flat on the floor, his posture militarily straight. He swallowed the nervous taste of bile.

'This is the White House, Mister President,' Steve said. 'I’m just a kid from Brooklyn. It feels—beyond my pay grade.'

'Well, I’m not sure that it is,' the President hummed. 'You’re not just a kid from Brooklyn anymore, Private Rogers; you’re one of the biggest political conundrums of my career. You were a Commando, and a medic. Captain Barnes’s Polish cell strikes have recovered—apparently—the hard copy records of your and others' programming, but we don’t have your original enlistment papers, just the Winter Soldier mission files, the files the Soviets made before you were relocated to the first American HYDRA base. You gave your life in service to this country, except it turns out you _didn’t_ ; turns out you were made into one of HYDRA’s most fearsome operatives. Turns out you’re an internationally known assassin.'

'I don’t do that anymore,' Steve said, almost cutting off the President of all people.

'No,' President Ellis agreed. 'No, you don’t.' They sat in silence then. Steve wanted to fidget under the weight of the stare but the pressure of sitting in the West Wing kept him still. His hearing implant could hear two people at the door behind him: Secret Service officers; he could see two more at the other door. They’d refused to let Sam accompany him to DC, but at least they wouldn’t leave him alone with the President.

'Why don’t you?' President Ellis asked after a long while. Steve frowned.

'Sir?'

'I’m told programming of this type is meant to be unshakeable,' the President said simply. 'You shook it.'

'They were meant to maintain it, sir,' Steve said, trying to keep his tone from sounding like a correction. 'They messed up. For it to be unshakeable, it needed to be new. They sent me on two missions in a row, without freezing me, without new doses of—the asset wasn’t supposed to be used like that. The asset was supposed to receive reprogramming or surgical maintenance between missions. When—' He broke off, looking away. His left eye closed involuntarily as a piercing jolt made its way thru his forebrain.

'It’s OK; go on,' the President said, misunderstanding his pause. Steve ignored the pain and went on.

'The last intended target of the Winter Soldier was Director Fury of SHIELD,' Steve said. 'Project: Insight would have made any kind of assassin obsolete, sir, not just the asset. When Captain Barnes found out about it, he began trying to stop it. They needed him out of the picture sooner than they’d thought. The asset was not meant to be used for this; the asset was meant to kill Director Fury and—and be decommissioned.'

'Decommissioned,' President Ellis repeated.

‘I don’t know. Maybe they would have put me in cryo and just never taken me out. Maybe they would have shot me in the skull. Maybe they would have told me to do it,’ Steve said. ‘Captain Barnes was meant to be eliminated by Project: Insight, like you, sir, but if Captain Barnes were trying to stop Insight, they couldn’t wait.'

'And who but a supersoldier can murder a supersoldier?' the President guessed. The piercing started to ebb away. Steve could look up again. He opened his eye. He could feel sweat cooling on the back of his neck; he wondered if he’d blanched pale when he had to struggle thru the pain. He felt nauseous, like his head couldn’t stop spinning even now that the pain was redshifted.

'Yes, sir,' he agreed, even if he privately thought HYDRA had taken an idiotic risk, not a clever one, sending the Winter Soldier after not only someone he’d known in his real life, but the person he’d known best. The idea that Bucky would come for him was the last thought from his life _Before_ that HYDRA had been able to strip from him. He thought they should have known that Bucky would be the first thing he would remember, too, especially with the last surgical maintenance weeks of defrosted-time behind him, and with his brain too warm to be properly prepped.

'So they sent you out on mission,' the President said, 'what, without _repairs_?' Steve shrugged.

'That’s about the size of it,' Steve said. 'I was unfrozen too long. I started healing. Without surgical checks, the asset—the asset could think, a little. Captain Barnes wore his old uniform onto the bridge of the Insight helicarrier where the asset had been stationed to stop him. It jogged enough memory to make the asset question the primary target. Questioning the target hurt me so much Captain Barnes could get past the asset.'

'Questioning your target caused pain?'

Steve nodded.

'Resisting the programming—any part of it, any of the protocols—caused pain. Some of the protocols were designed to cause pain even if the asset was perfectly compliant. The programming—what’s left of it—still causes pain, but I’ve healed a lot.'

'It’s getting better, sir,' Steve told him. 'The programming can’t make me do anything anymore. The pain can’t make me. No one can make me do stuff anymore.' He said that almost too insistently but it was true. It was true and the President should know it. Steve was a person again; he wasn’t ever going to be fully recovered, not really, but damn if he weren’t a person now. No one could make him do anything and Steve held on to that thought alone on his worst days.

'Do you know why I had you brought here today?' the President asked, linking his fingers across his stomach and steepling his thumbs.

'No, sir,' Steve replied. He wasn’t supposed to be able to go anywhere or do anything that wasn’t approved by the state of New York; he’d been released from custody after his arrest but he was supposed to be arraigned soon. He didn’t know why the President of the United States would want to see him. He wasn’t supposed to be in DC, that he knew; that was why he hadn’t seen Peggy yet. He wasn’t yet allowed to travel, but he supposed the rules didn’t apply if the President himself had you picked up by Secret Service and brought somewhere.

'Many people don’t want you to see the light of day,' the President said. Steve swallowed. 'A lot of people—many of them my constituents—want you to rot, ’til the end of days, in the worst jail cell America has at her disposal.' Steve looked down, at his nervous hands. He couldn’t help it. 'Do you understand why they want that?' President Ellis asked him.

'Yes, sir,' Steve admitted.

'Can you tell me?'

'It’s so horrible,' Steve said. 'Everything HYDRA used the asset for. I killed people. I was used to start wars. I was used to blame others and create chaos. None of it should have happened but it did. People want someone to pay for it. They want justice. I understand that. I understand why people think I should be the one to pay. I was programmed, but I did do it.'

'You don’t deny it,' the President said. Steve shook his head.

'But I wasn’t a _person_ then,' he said, a little desperately. He wished he were strong enough to look President Ellis in the eye. ‘I couldn’t make _choices_. I didn’t want to do it; I didn’t want to kill anyone but that didn’t matter. There wasn't even a piece of me in my head to not want to, once they finished building the asset. They made me do it, so there’s nothing to deny. Just because they made me—I still did it, sir.'

'Do you think you should go to jail, Private Rogers?'

'I don’t know,' Steve managed. 'I don’t know if—I don’t know if it would be justice, to make me pay for what HYDRA made me do. I didn’t have a choice in any of it, but it still happened. I don’t know if I’m guilty, sir. I’m sorry, but I really don’t know.'

'It’s a hard question, isn’t it?'

'Yes, sir.'

'There are other people,' the President went on. 'These people want to make you comb thru all of the HYDRA files we have with a committee of professionals, to sort out what really happened. This would be a truth commission. A lot of countries would sit in.'

Steve looked up. Bucky talked about that all the time; he thought Steve would be declared not guilty in a domestic trial and then asked to sit for an international commission just like that. Steve couldn’t imagine being found not guilty; he was, surely, at least a little guilty. The police had chosen a mission where the asset had left a target to report a programme. They’d shown him he could have stopped; he could have stopped and should have stopped, long before Bucky challenged him on the helicarrier. He could have done more; he could have saved more; he could have been stronger. He was at least a little guilty, no matter how badly they’d broken him.

‘This, to me, feels like a better solution,’ President Ellis said. ‘This might let us find out how badly HYDRA has damaged our world. Leaving you to rot leaves every secret they tried to strip from you out of reach forever.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Steve said, when the President paused for a moment.

‘I don’t want to see you in prison,’ the President said. ‘It would score me quick points and nothing more. Frankly, it might hurt my party in the long run.’

‘Sir?’ Steve asked. He didn’t think that should factor in. Surely the question at hand was much larger than the party lines. Surely the nation needed a broader idea of justice than the political one.

'I have only two years left as President, and I can’t run for a third term; I’m not FDR,' President Ellis joked. Steve felt vaguely nauseous at the idea that his fate was being decided for partisan benefit, not to ameliorate the pain HYDRA had given the families of victims directly and the world thru complex schemes and corruption. He couldn’t possibly say anything. 'I don't want the Winter Soldier’s trial to supersede everything I want to accomplish in the next two years.'

'The trials we have already begun, for all of the American officials involved, and for the SHIELD officials who survived the collapse: they’ve already dominated so much of my presidency,' the President said. 'I don’t want to see any more of my goals overshadowed than I need to. I want to hold those American people who betrayed the ideals of our nation accountable for their mistakes, of course. I want to know the extent of HYDRA’s plans, had they come to fruition. I want to know how much of world history they manipulated. In their absence, or their absence as soon as Captain Barnes finishes wiping them off the map, I need to know who America’s allies are, really. I can’t do any of that if your brain isn’t picked clean.’

‘I want you to sit with the international truth commission,’ the President told him. 'There’re really only a few ways for that to happen.’ Steve stared.

‘The first is for you to be arraigned tomorrow, and for the trial to go on once you’re released from deprogramming—and I won’t have you stand trial while still in treatment. It isn’t safe for any of us; it makes my party look bad for having suggested it and makes the police look worse for having acted on it; it’s not safe and I simply won’t allow it—the trial would go on in hopes that you’d be found not guilty. You probably would be found not guilty, especially if the programming evidence found in storage in Poland is as compelling as prelim reports from recovery crews suggest it will be.

‘The second is for you to accept a pardon,’ the President said. ‘You would no longer be subject to American prosecution, federal or state, and while the rest of the world could still charge you either with murder or as an unauthorized combatant, they likely wouldn’t. America lost a lot of respect on the world stage when so much of our Cabinet and SHIELD was corrupted, but we have enough clout that an American pardon would extend further than it legally does.

‘A pardon?’ Steve echoed. 'I’d—I’d be forgiven?'

'Accepting the pardon is an admission of guilt, Private. You’d be accepting that guilt, that _legal definition of guilt_ ,' the President said. Steve nodded. He could feel his expression changing, but he didn’t know what it was, if the President could read him. He didn’t know if the President could see the anxious relief the idea of admitting he’d done it, of being forgiven, gave him.

'I would be waiving your obligation to serve time for it, that’s all,' he said. 'By pardoning you, I can make the commission happen sooner. If we let a trial run its course, it would take months. Could take years. If you’re declared guilty, you’d be sent to the Raft and held underwater for the rest of your days. Keep in mind that some of the science they’ve done on Barnes suggests he’s not aging properly; I imagine your life in prison would be much longer than anyone else’s could be. If you’re declared not guilty, it could be over a year from now and my momentum, politically, would be much less.'

'A truth commission would ask me about everything,' Steve guessed. 'They’d talk about more than a trial would. They’d ask me and decide why HYDRA did it, why HYDRA used me like—why they made me do what they did. They’d figure out what happened, ‘cause I can’t. A trial would prove it was my body; that’s all.'

'Yes,' President Ellis agreed. 'The SHIELD collapse trials are dragging plenty Americans thru the mud; they deserve it, but we also need an American hero now, Private, not another villain. We need to remind people you were taken as a soldier, that you might be a redeemable character. You certainly look like a victim in the arrest video, in the paparazzi footage of them unloading you from the ambulance.’ Steve didn’t know what to say, even if it felt like the President’s pause was prompting him to respond.

‘That must’ve been scary,’ the President added; ‘I’ve never heard someone’s lungs do that before.'

‘It’s not always that bad,' Steve said, unsure. ‘The police took my medicine and stopped the emergency supply in the arm.’ President Ellis hummed, almost sympathetic.

'Besides all that, Stark’s CEO, Potts, has started manipulating the news cycles,' the President added. 'She’s making the same marketing points in the media that Barnes and Rhodes have been making on your behalf in government. They’ve been pounding away for months, but Potts is the one who will change things in the next few weeks. A smart man syncs his agenda with hers and rides her wave to success; that’s exactly what I plan to do. The commission, if started when you’re released from the CIA Adjunct Hospital and not a year from then, can have more effect, politically and judicially, than any additional trials might. There have already been enough.’

The President stood. Steve stood too; he could feel his hand gripping and loosening his metal wrist over and over again. He couldn’t stop the nervous tick.

‘Think about it,’ the President said. ‘Discuss it with the pardon officer, with your lawyer. It’s a serious thing, Rogers.’

‘I don’t think I need to think about it,’ Steve said. ‘I did it. I was forced but I did do it, and I should have to fix it, shouldn’t I? Shouldn’t I have to sit on the commission? Shouldn’t I fight HYDRA with Bucky?’

‘I think so,’ President Ellis said. He smiled again, warm and sincere. Steve didn’t know how to believe the smile, but he knew that the pardon could let him try to make up for what the Winter Soldier had done. It wouldn’t be enough, because nothing could never be enough. He could never bring back the people he killed; he could never help those families find peace, or let the people who’d been punished in the rare occasion the world thought they’d found the assassin get their lives back. There was no real way to right the world. There wasn’t a real way to fix what he had been forced to destroy.

The President stuck out a hand. Steve took it.

He might be able to at least help people understand why.

^^^

Bucky hated flying. He hated it so fucking much. He hated it even all this time now, after years had armoured him from the crash that had killed him. Some part of his lizard brain—the part that had been instantly and viscerally afraid when Bucky had realised the Valkyrie needed to go into the water—hadn't yet learned that the interminable humming of the engines didn't mean, this time, they were going to crash and drown; it set his teeth on edge. The shift of the plane under his feet as they flew over air currents would have been next to nothing when Bucky was a brave soldier. Now it put a shake in his legs and forced his voice to come out quieter than he liked or wanted.

He hated airports too. Big ones were filled with people, noise, locked doors, and vulnerable windows. There was almost no easy way in a commercial airport to watch your six and your front. He felt less of a sick twisting in his stomach at the little private ones where he landed when he came home from mission or when he took one of Tony’s planes on mission instead of booking a real ticket. The little private airports felt like bases, sometimes, just a little air strip, a few hangars, a couple of buildings. He hated them only because when the press wanted to talk to Captain America, they gathered en masses outside the fence, in the little parking lots. He could see them and their vans as the pilot taxied them down the little runway.

'Bit of a crowd, eh, Cap?' Molly said dryly. Bucky nodded absently, from where he kept an uncomfortable grip on the arms of the seat beside her. 'Landing wasn’t so bad, was it?'

'No, best I’ve had in a while,' he said politely. The first time she’d flown him had been with a few of the evacuation coordinators and a couple of paramilitary coordinators. It had been a terribly windy January day. That had been one hell of a flight and there had been nothing Molly could have done to make it better. He’d thrown up from the fear of it and none of the LEOs on the flight with him had said a thing about it, just taken the paper bag and given him a bottle of water. Sometimes people were unbelievably gentle. 'Let’s do it again, somewhere else,' he said insincerely. She hummed her amusement, flicking switches. The engine began ticking down. 'Come on, let's take off again, right after I flip these reporters the bird.'

'I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you walk out of the plane flipping the bird,' Molly dared, unbuckling her seatbelt. He followed suit but let her precede him towards the door by the wings.

'I’ll give you two thousand dollars if you fly us away right now,' he countered. She batted away his attempt to help her with the door. He figured it was her job and he was being condescending, not polite, so he stepped away.

'You’re not gonna do it,' Molly guessed. She sounded not at all disappointed. 'What do they want?'

'Probably to ask me about Private Rogers' arrest,' he said shortly.

'Did you two really grow up together?' Molly asked, pausing before opening the door and lowering the stairs. This was perhaps the most common of the questions people asked him about Steve. He didn't know why of all the details about Captain America that that was the one people doubted wasn't just added to make a good narrative.

'Yeah, we were born a couple blocks apart, met when we were six and seven; we grew up best friends, still are,' Bucky told her. 'When his ma died, we moved in together, you know, split the rent. Then I got drafted, had to ship out.'

'Wow,' she said softly, entirely to herself. She lowered the stairs and the cacophony began before he was even visible thru the door. 'Good fucking luck with them, bud,' Molly also said to herself as she got to walk away, circle the plane and finish landing procedure. Bucky had to face the crowd. He could see Happy and one of Tony’s cars with a clear exit in the lot; Happy gave him a lazy wave at a distance, leaning against the hood.

'Captain Barnes! Captain Barnes!' He raised a hand as he walked, and most of them stopped shouting.

'Yeah, I’ll answer two questions on my way to the car; make 'em count,' he suggested.

'Captain Barnes, some of the files you’ve found in Poland suggest the Winter Soldier might have killed an American president; doesn’t this make him a traitor?'

'No, Private Rogers had been brainwashed and tortured,' Bucky said flatly, walking quickly enough that the cameras would have bad, bouncing footage trailing after him. It was rude, but he hated when the reporters found out where he’d be and met him there. He understood their job was to pester him with questions; that didn't mean he didn't wish they would be satisfied with his close-to-frequent press conferences.

'He wasn’t betraying his nation,’ Bucky said; ‘he was serving the longest term any soldier ever has as a prisoner of war. HYDRA’s scientists—many of them recruited by American presidents—cut into his brain and removed his ability to make choices. He is a victim of HYDRA, not one of their criminals. Next question.'

'Captain, what’s your opinion on the leaked footage of Rogers' police interview?'

'I have been in Poland all week trying to eradicate terrorists,' Bucky said simply. 'HYDRA is still alive in a lot of the world and that is my priority right now.'

'I haven’t seen any of the footage leaked from the police,' he finished. He privately thought it was bound to brass him off. 'Thanks, guys.' The shouts rose up in chaos behind him, but Happy had timed it well; he opened the door for Bucky and Bucky slid right into the car. The reporters were well-behaved enough to not even step toward the window once Happy closed the door; they stood beyond the medium tint of the glass on the airport’s sidewalk and looked disappointed. The cameraman whose reporter had asked the second question smacked his arm for wasting it. Happy slammed the door of the driver’s seat.

'And we’re off,' Happy announced, and they were. Tony's car, as always, purred like a perfectly-tuned jungle cat, rumbling beneath Bucky. 'That wasn’t so bad, huh?'

'Yeah, man, all this is fucking peachy,' Bucky grumbled, fumbling for his seatbelt. Soft jazz played on the radio; it sounded like music from close to home. Bucky was horrified that his own brain told him it was old-timey, even if it was in a version of Nat’s voice.

'Level with me,' Bucky said, like he seemed to every time he saw Happy. 'What the fuck is going on?'

'Um, well, all the reporters who had a chance to talk to you are going to realise they missed the scoop any minute now; look in the mirror,' Happy said. 'It’s a straight road away from the lot for another couple hundred yards; aw, I hope we see it happen.' Bucky found himself stooping his head a bit to watch in the side mirror; he linked his fingers over his lap. Happy chuckled to himself and it may have been at Bucky’s expense.

Sure enough, Bucky watched as some Asian reporter by the Channel 7 news van, looking at his phone, drop his mic and clutch his hair, staring at Bucky’s departing car as tho the sun itself were darkening. A wave of panic spread over the reporters as they watched Bucky disappear. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was amusing.

'What scoop did they miss?' Bucky asked. 'I missed it too, while I was in Poland for _eight fucking years_.' He was exaggerating, he knew, and by quite a lot, but his heart was beginning to chafe from the constant rub of frustration and impatience. Steve was supposed to be safe while Bucky was gone; instead he’d been arrested and interviewed and investigated and Bucky had been too far away to do jack shit.

'I have Pepper’s satellite feed, not a news station relay, so I heard it the second it happened, officially,' Happy explained. 'Steve's been pardoned.’

‘What?’ Bucky demanded. ‘Steve's been acquitted?’

‘Well, no, he's been removed of some obligations of the crimes of the Winter Soldier,’ Happy said.

‘He's been removed of some obligations,’ Bucky repeated.

‘The President issued an executive order, officially pardoning him—’

‘Pardoning him?’ Bucky echoed. ‘You can't pardon someone who's not guilty. He's not guilty: how—’

‘The pardon feels like a relief to him,’ Happy corrected. ‘I wouldn't challenge it; Steve was relieved. The Department of Justice will form a temporary sub-department to process the information from the SHIELD information dump and from your recovery missions, and the recovery missions the Taiwanese have led on your recommendations, even some you didn’t in China.' Bucky admired the risk that that truly, truly represented. He hoped Taiwan didn’t pay for it.

'All right,' Bucky said, taking this in. The information dump had held terabytes of information and it was overwhelming information at that. Even then, it had nothing on programming, of Steve or anyone else, only some Winter Soldier mission files, way less information than the world had needed to see Steve as a prisoner. The film reels he’d just found in Poland—the reels with dozens of initials, dozens of people—were the first real evidence of Steve’s programming. Bucky had nonetheless assumed the government had at least done what he had; immediately after the chaos of DC was settled, he’d hired nine university grads, set them up in a building near Columbia University and Bryn Mawr. The kid with a graduate degree in counterterrorism had studied under Peggy’s daughter at Georgetown; Bucky was reminded everyday how small of a world it was.

He’d rented them a two-room office with a small kitchen near the major embassies he frequented and they’d been providing him with a steady stream of relevant information to sift thru for almost a year now. They had helped him plan all of the cell strikes, cataloguing information Bucky didn’t need and sending it to the people who did, the justice departments struggling to convict government officials revealed to be HYDRA, or NGOs that might benefit from it. They’d prepared dozens of memos on SHIELD money laundering and embezzlement; Bucky had received a letter of thanks from the Federal Commission, which he’d told the kids he’d hired to put on their damn resumes before giving them their copies of the letter. It had been neat to see the kids get excited over copy paper, even when he understood the words and signature photocopied there meant more than that.

'The committee at the new sub-department represents one-third of the delegates who will be sent to the UN truth commission,' Happy went on. ‘One third will be from South American countries—I’ll admit I don’t remember which, but they’re the four who were apparently least infiltrated by HYDRA—and the final third will be from Wakanda, South Africa, and Egypt. Israel and Armenia will moderate interviews and supervise document investigations. Somewhat officially, so will Kurdistan.’

'A truth commission?' Bucky said.

'Yeah,' Happy said. 'The world’s agreed not to prosecute Steve but ask him to help them make sense of what really happened. The commission is going to spend the next three months of his recovery getting ready to interview him, and then he’ll have to go when he’s discharged to participate.'

'Wow,' Bucky said. He looked out the window, at the passing lampposts. Electricity was everywhere now, and he still wasn’t used to it.

A truth commission was better than a trial. A truth commission was better than a lot of things that could have happened. It was a lot better than a trial. A truth commission would hopefully find the truth, which was that HYDRA had been allowed to survive and twist world history for far longer than it should have.

‘It was kind of incredible to see it all come together,’ Happy told him. ‘It’s been months and months of tiny steps forward. People were so angry that a government-subsidized hospital was helping the Winter Soldier shake off his programming; I thought he’d end up in jail as payback for the cost alone, even if they would’ve paid to jail him just as much. I feel like I spent so long watching you try to remind people he twice signed enlistment papers to fight for this country and that they oughta help him out in return: thousands of tiny, tiny, tiny advances and no progress. Steve was just trying to get better, you know?’

‘I know,’ Bucky agreed. He had felt the frustration too, had felt terrified that Steve would be convicted and Bucky would lose him again. ‘I know; fuck, I can’t believe the charges are gone! I can’t believe he’s not going to jail. He’s an _idiot_ , Happy; he woulda plead guilty given the chance.’

‘I mean, it all happened so fast: _boom boom boom_ ,’ Happy said. ‘He’s arrested and then video leaks, and the world exploded. People couldn’t stop watching it, and, suddenly, people see him as we do: someone who’s trying really hard to be a person. It was months of watching you guys grind and grind and then it was like seeing the levee break. I feel like Steve’s gonna get outta this one.’

‘Holy shit,’ Bucky said. He felt like he might float away with the relief that—Steve wouldn’t go to jail; Steve wouldn’t leave him; Steve wasn’t going to plead guilty; the world would find out the truth and people might fucking understand what Steve had gone thru. The world might be forced to consider what had happened to Steve, what had happened to the world, to history, to the thousands of innocents HYDRA had manipulated and controlled and disenfranchised and lied to and misled. Maybe the world would have to consider how badly it had failed, what evil it had been blind to. Maybe it would keep something so horrible from happening again. Maybe it would make people so afraid that something worse happened next.

^^^

Steve watched the runway approach the landing gear of the plane. The wheels hit hard and with a bounce; Steve understood why Bucky hated flying so much. Even the best flights bounced their passengers around, and even the best landings still involved hitting a solid object with another at several hundred miles an hour. The CR-J was empty but for him. He’d settled in the third row’s window seat when the solitary flight attendant (Steve suspected from his posture that the man was Secret Service in an American Airlines uniform) had told him to sit anywhere he liked. As the whining of the stop flaps began to subside, as the plane started taxiing to its gate, the attendant appeared at his side in the aisle.

'Your security escort will meet you when you deplane, inside the doors,' the attendant told him. 'Make sure you take everything with you when you go.'

'Thanks,' Steve said, even if he didn’t have anything by way of carry-on. He didn’t even have his own phone yet; he didn’t need one. He was always either in the Tower, where they had a landline, or with his security escorts. He had made friends at his new synagogue, of course, but until he wasn’t an outpatient, there was no point in owning his own phone. So few people were allowed to contact him. It was a social device or a work device. Steve’s life couldn't include much of either at the moment.

He realised that was going to change, that he was going to be pardoned, that he was going to try to fix this, that the world was gonna help him, that it was all gonna be OK. It could actually be OK now; it was all possible and the idea almost made him cry. His eyes stung embarrassingly.

'You’ll be exiting onto the tarmac and then into the terminal,' the attendant said. 'So don’t leave the painted walkways, all right?' He nodded jerkily.

'All right,' Steve said.

The Secret Service had frogmarched him onto the plane. He had expected they would be at the bottom of the plane’s stairs to frogmarch him off it. Come to think, Steve realised, watching with a frown the attendant walk away, he had said escort, singular. Steve wondered if informally accepting the pardon had formal repercussions. The pardon officer who had walked him thru the more technical aspects of the pardon after the President left him had made it clear Harieth would have to hear them out too before they’d let him accept. The President had only wanted to meet him one-on-one. Harieth would fly out in the morning to negotiate final details with the pardon office. Steve didn’t mind that. He felt relieved as it was.

He knew it was stupid, impossible, naïve, and idealistic, but he felt like he’d been given a chance to fix things. He wanted to fix things. He wanted to world to try to understand what had happened, both to him and to the men with whom he’d died in the labs at Azzano, to the people who suffered under HYDRA’s manipulation of history, and everyone HYDRA had made him hurt. He wanted to fight the last remains of HYDRA with Bucky and his team. He wanted to make sure HYDRA couldn’t hurt him again, couldn’t hurt others like they’d hurt him, couldn’t ruin democracy and freedom and fairness. He couldn’t do it from a jailhouse. Bucky might finish HYDRA off before a commission came and went; he might not. Steve might be able to push thru his fear and commit violence, this time for the right cause, or he might not; he might stay on the sidelines and try to piece together Bucky’s plans into something impenetrable. Steve had a chance now, in a way he hadn’t before.

He was glad the fake flight attendant had walked back to his jump seat; Steve leaned his head into the cool, future-plastic of the window and let his eyes stream. He felt _hopeful_. He couldn’t believe it. He had thought he would never feel this light in his chest again; he thought it was lost in the scars and the always-going-to-linger stains of the programming. But today: he felt hopeful.

Bucky was going to be furious. He would hide it, and it might even burn out by the time Steve saw him, but he would be furious.

^^^

Nat met him in the hallway, stepping out of her apartment like she’d asked JARVIS to time his arrival. He bet she had. Every part of him itched to go into his apartment across the hall; he wasn’t rude, but God damn, he needed to see Stevie. He almost waved and walked past her. He knew he shouldn’t, but damn, it was tempting.

'Keep your fucking pants on,' she said, referring to his clear indecision about even acknowledging her right now. 'We need to talk before you go in.'

'OK,' he agreed. Her door slid shut and they stood in the foyer between the three guest apartments on their floor. Tony had offered Sam the third; Sam had laughed and said if he were to move to New York full-time that he’d keep living with Bucky and Steve. Tony thought they were strange, comfortable in each other’s space all the time. They didn’t think they each needed three bedroom apartments and their own high-end kitchens; they could share one too easily. 'What’s up? Everything all right?'

'It will be if you keep your fucking pants on,' she said. 'But if you go in there and yell at him like he thinks you're going to—'

'I’m not going to yell at him,' Bucky snapped. Nat gave him the most derisive look she had in months. 'I am not going to fucking _yell_ at him, Natasha.'

'Really?' Nat pushed. 'You’re not in danger of flying off the handle when he says, _yes, I am guilty; yes, I needed to be forgiven_?'

Bucky's lungs hauled in a shouting breath before he even realised it. That shut him up; he forced the air out of his lungs and forced himself to breathe, calmly and as tho his world wasn't on fire. He realised he had no right, not even to speak.

He stared at her; the idea scalded him like a rolling boil in his skeleton, along every nerve. She looked not at all smug, despite how right she was. He’d already snapped at her; she hadn’t even baited him yet when he had snapped at her. She had baited him for good measure and, damn, if she weren’t right. He needed to pull it together.

'You _can’t_ go in there and yell at him,' Nat said, like an order. 'I don’t work much with Steve anymore—he’s an outpatient—but I know the kid pretty well. If you yell at him about this, he’d be wrecked. You know how much that would hurt him.'

'I know,' Bucky agreed. 'But, Jesus, Nat, he’s not guilty. They removed entire functions of his brain. He was _tortured_. He was surgically modified and forced beyond what's even humanly possible—He—They _destroyed_ him; he’s been fighting so hard just to come back—'

‘Not only have I been programmed before, but I helped pull the craziest shit I’ve ever seen out of his head. I know what he’s been thru,’ Nat reminded him, interrupting him forcefully. ‘You’re preaching to the literal choir, Buck.’

'Yeah, well, that's how you get 'em to sing,' Bucky sighed.

'Declaring him not guilty in a trial would take months and maybe years,' Nat went on. 'Months and _years_ of Steve having to defend himself to nation after nation and maybe states in between.' Steve thought he was guilty; Steve might have pled guilty. Nat was right; it was insane to resent the pardon. It protected Steve like Bucky couldn’t. It protected Steve where his own pride would have killed them.

God, if that didn’t make Bucky feel like a failure.

Nat went on: 'It would set a dangerous precedent. If he’s charged, and tried, and acquitted here, other countries will use trials to get their answers. No one will trust a truth commission with someone who was dragged thru all those questions in a courtroom. The EU wouldn’t even do that, let alone the UN or fucking _Russia_ , Bucky. You've been the biggest source of information so far; your raids on information holds have given the commission a dozen terabytes to dig thru before they ask him anything. It's never gonna come down to his patchy memory, now, OK; what you've already done is gonna be his biggest shield, OK? The commission will dig thru your files for answers and he'll get to confirm them or explain. That's it. It won't be a trial. It might not even hurt him so bad, by the time we get there.

‘Bucky, you know how Russia could prosecute him. Think about how _Korea_ could prosecute him. Think about what HYDRA made him do and how much of the world was torn apart by a war no one knew we were fighting; think about all the places in the world where he was forced to do something terrible, all the places that could sentence him to the Raft. You want him bouncing from place to place for a decade being told again and again he’s a criminal? You want him going from place to place, having to try to deny something that _did_ happen to him, that was real?'

'No,' Bucky said weakly.

'You know he’s not responsible, but he did do it,' Nat reminded him. 'It would be a form of confession; there’s no way around it in a trial. He’ll have to confess in one way or another to everything the ghost did, on the stand, and it will be very hard to make sure there aren’t enough vengeful peers in the jury to see him convicted—'

'He doesn’t have any _peers_ ,' Bucky snapped, coming very close to yelling again. Nat hit his arm. He had to stop; he couldn’t. He lowered his voice and hissed, ' _no one else_ survived Zola; no one has ever been a prisoner of war as long as he was, let alone—'

'So thank God this doesn’t go to trial, you fucking idiot,' Nat said, hitting his arm again for good measure. He clutched his bicep even if her tiny fist had not been struck out with enough force for him to really feel it. 'Everything you’re trying to protect him from: the President handed it to you on a silver fucking plate and you’re complaining that it wasn’t a platter.'

'I just—' Bucky tried. He shook his head. 'This isn’t good enough for him. He deserves better.'

'He’s got you,' Nat said. 'I can’t think of a better thing.' There was something very honest in that; Bucky looked away best he could, shifting his grip on his go-bag’s handle. 'But your stupid qualms about the pardon? No one gives a shit about your _qualms_ , Bucky. We give a shit about protecting Steve, not what protecting him looks like, and you better start fucking acting like you do too.'

'Excuse you,' Bucky said seriously, because, yeah, he was in the wrong about the pardon, but Nat of all people didn’t get to imply he didn’t give a shit about Steve. Her face shuttered, imperceptible. Bucky still knew her so well.

Natasha had been the one he’d grieved with, the one he’d told about Steve for the first time. She knew how much Bucky loved Steve; she’d seen the hole in the universe his death had left behind. She’d been the third person in the world to know how he felt about Steve, and the other two had loved Bucky back. Nat might have loved him back eventually if things had been different; Natasha might have been able to love him back, given enough time and care. She knew how it felt to be held by Bucky; she had to know he was that good to Steve too.

She had been the one at his side when he found out Steve was alive; she had changed everything about her life and helped Steve recover almost as much as Melissa. She’d worked with Steve and she’d been the best at convincing him to sleep in the early days, Steve said. Sometimes when Steve was scared for no reason, he’d still wander to Nat’s, or if he was in lockdown, make JARVIS send her over to him. Sometimes Nat was the one who sat on the bed and let Steve lie still, holding her knee with his own hand while she murmured in Russian, her accent identical to his. Sometimes Steve would whisper back. Once they had shouted at each other in Russian until Nat had stormed out. Nat knew as much about their relationship as Bucky did. He didn’t resent that anymore. It had helped Steve. It still helped Steve, just like the pardon would.

But Nat had also hurt him. Natasha had outed him to Fury, to SHIELD. Those recordings, those moments she stole from him, maybe just the transcripts: they were still in the Internet database onto which she’d dumped all of SHIELD’s secrets. They had had to dump them; they had had to be public. There was no way to rightfully censor it. Bucky wasn’t the only one trying to root out every bit of HYDRA from SHIELD’s files and records; he wasn’t the only one following every crumb. African nations had been taking out HYDRA cells on their own, mobilizing national guards and allowing citizen militias. They were destroying cells and adding to the database their found records and files with an efficiency that rivalled Bucky’s; he’d gone to Libya twice—Kenya three times—to sit at multinational planning conferences and give advice, offer to help with the active strikes. His own office spent most of its time digging thru the files; Sharon led a group at the CIA which dug thru files; the UN was eventually going to get past their own red tape and form a committee.

It was a matter of time before Bucky would be outed for real, before those moments, the ones she had stolen from him when making him smile again and showing him sunshine, would be found. Nat had told him they were friends; Nat had offered him something more and then Nat had spied on him. He should have known better than to trust a SHIELD agent, maybe, but it had still fucking hurt. She didn’t get to imply he didn’t love enough or carefully enough.

At the same time, he realized if he’d yelled at Steve, it would have been as awful to Steve as being outed to the world would be to him, when it finally happened. They'd be different hurts but damn if Bucky couldn't see how vicious yelling would have been. His sternum froze deep, deep in his chest. The cold made him realise how hot he had been. He had been burning to death and he was so used to anger that he couldn’t hear it.

'I won't yell, but you’re right; I was going to. Thank you for stopping me,' he said quietly. Something shifted in Natasha’s eyes. She believed him.

'I wish we hung out more,' Nat added, like she’d been meaning to for a while and simply thought now was as good a time as any. Bucky nodded weakly. 'The three of us,' she mediated, sensing his awkwardness but clearly not understanding what his fucking problem was. It was visceral and he barely understood it himself. 'I mean, whatever, but we should hang out more.'

'I know,' he said. 'I’m sorry. It’s not like I’m avoiding you; I feel like there’s a war on.'

'And am I gonna be just a soldier to you forever? I hurt you, Buck; I get that,' she began.

'You don’t have to keep apologizing,' he said, because this would be apology number five, from a Black Widow.

'I’m not,' she said. He raised a brow. 'I’m not going to anymore, but if I can’t keep apologizing, you have to be my fucking friend again. We fight together. We need to laugh and drink together too, and not just—the team functions are great, but—' She looked almost pained to admit it. '—I miss you. I miss hanging out with you.'

'I just,' he tried, because she deserved an explanation. He glanced at his own door; he wanted so badly to leave. Natasha deserved an explanation. He hated that they were in the hallway. He hated that he could see, in his full-resolution one-hundred-eighty degree vision, in the peripheral beyond that, their reflections in the mirror across from the smart elevator. There was no way to turn away from her, hide himself while he revealed his heart again.

It was stupid to feel nervous; she wasn’t a spy anymore.

'I kissed you,' he said, like she didn’t know that. She looked surprised. She hadn’t thought that was the problem, clearly.

'I _wanted_ ,' Bucky emphasized. 'I wanted someone who I thought he’d never know, that he’d never—I wanted someone else and it was just like he always said it would be: it wasn’t better or worse; it was just different. It made me think about—Before the serum, we always knew he was sickly, that he’d die young and sick and I’d have to marry a nice girl; I fucking hated the idea that he’d be gone and I’d—that someone could replace him—'

'I never wanted to replace—' Nat said, insistently, almost desperate, and he believed her. He stopped her, his flat palm snapping up to quiet her. Unbelievably, her marble swayed for him.

'But I _felt_ , in a way I hadn’t since Steve, or even Peggy,' he admitted, having barely paused. It wasn’t about the replacement of someone; no one couldn’t actually have replaced Steve, or her, for that matter, or Peggy. Replacement, exchangeability, the idea that people could be traded like parts, that he might marry some nice Catholic girl from a nice Catholic family, not someone he loved as desperately as Steve: those had just been his eighteen-year-old fears. They wouldn’t happen in real life and he’d lived enough now to know that.

'And I know now, without a doubt, that if he had really died, I’d have moved on.’ She stared at him. She didn't have any words and it seemed fake, that he might have surprised her enough by being honest to shut her up. 'I would have moved on. I started to.'  

‘I _liked_ kissing you, Nat,’ he went on. He couldn't help it, in the silence, to admit what was going on inside him. ‘You’re so God damn beautiful. I slept better next to you than I had—in years? Fuck, I don’t know. It was a night in the woods and I liked it, and he’s not dead, he’s here, and he’s still mine, but I still wouldn’t trade that night or that talk or any of it. That makes me feel like—Cheating isn’t the right word; commitment never meant that to us, but—I—' He broke off. He looked away again, as far away as he could. His palm felt like ice against the canvas flak of his bag’s strap. 'I don’t know.'

'I can’t look at you without feeling it,' he admitted. 'I still haven’t told him, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to.’

'You thought he was dead; it’s not like he’s going to—' Nat tried, and of course she was right. She shook her head at herself, maybe at him. 'If I can’t keep apologizing, I should get to be forgiven.'

'You are,' Bucky said. 'That’s the worst part. I forgave you and it didn’t stop hurting.'

'OK,' she said simply. He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know what to say. 'So go see him.'

'Nat—' he started, because he didn’t want her to feel unwanted. He didn’t want her to feel hurt; _he_ felt hurt and that was the whole problem.

'Go see him,' she ordered. 'I need to think. Go see him, and don’t yell, or I’ll have Clint hide in the vents and shoot you dead on the john.'

'Thanks,' Bucky said again.

She disappeared into her apartment. Bucky wondered if she was lonely there; looking back, he’d been lonely when he’d first moved into the Stark Tower apartments. He hadn’t had any friends or family, no one in this century and no idea of how to go about life, let alone friendship. He wondered how he could be good to her. He’d have to learn.

Bucky’s door slid open and at first the apartment looked empty. When Steve was home alone, there was usually a member of Sam’s security team sitting by the door, keeping watch unnecessarily but by order of the state. The chair wasn’t only empty but had been tucked back at the head of the desk Bucky had put by the bookshelves, a place for Steve to sit while Bucky worked. Wow, he realised, because the pardon must have made this possible. Steve had been alone in the apartment; Steve was unsupervised. Steve was just a normal guy now, waiting for his sweetheart to come home.

It was a revelation, truly.

Bucky put down his go-bag and his shield in the foyer, under the credenza, reaching up to unstrap the shield’s harness. He dropped that onto his bag; one of the buckles clinked against itself and suddenly Steve was in the doorway to the kitchen. He’d given himself a haircut; Bucky could tell by the uneven bluntness of it that Steve had hacked at it with a too-sharp knife, the length just short enough to stay off his shoulders: nonsensory. Bucky felt his face begin to crack into a smile. Steve beamed back.

They met in the middle, because they knew each other, of course they did. Bucky bent a little, letting Steve toss his arms over Buck’s shoulders and around his neck. He wrapped his arms around Steve’s middle and lifted his tiny feet from the ground, burying his face in Steve’s shoulder and breathing deeply. It was nothing about Steve’s actual smell—right now, he smelled like the cheap soap he favoured, like the metal of the arm, and a little stale, like cigarettes, the ultimate smell drifting from the cardigan of Bucky’s he was wearing—but he smelled like home. He could feel Steve’s hands fisting the material of his bulletproof jacket; Steve gripped tight enough that Bucky could pretend for a moment that they didn’t ever need to let go.

'Thank God you’re all right,' Steve said into his ear, a little desperately relieved, like he did every time Bucky came home from a mission, or a series of strikes. ‘Thank _God_ , Buck.’

'Me?' Bucky laughed. 'You’re the one you should be worried about, matoki,' he added, before layering kisses into Steve’s neck, his cheek. He let Steve’s feet settle back onto the ground. Steve’s hands cupped his head for a moment, as if checking him over. Steve pulled him into a kiss, and, God, if Bucky didn't love this man with all his heart. He kissed Steve so hard he practically bowed him backwards.

'I worry about you,' Steve told him when Bucky let go. His voice was soft and sincere; his voice was a promise. Sometimes Bucky felt that the force of Steve’s faith was what kept him safe in the battlefield, even if more of his head knew that was silly. Did the people who didn’t come home not have anyone praying or wishing for them? It seemed impossible. Bucky knew it all came down to luck. Tony would call it the Chaos Theory. Steve let go of his head, holding onto his forearms where Bucky gripped his sides, where Bucky couldn’t help but hold on in order to make sure, to feel, that Steve was all right.

'I know,' he promised. 'I’m so fucking glad to see you. You’re all right, yeah? How are you?'

'I’m—It was bad,' Steve said honestly. 'It was actually fucking awful, Bucky. They took me away from Sam, and they—When I was being arrested, I couldn’t understand what was happening; they made Sam move away and he’s not supposed to go away when we’re in public and I couldn’t figure out what was happening. My brain hurt and I didn’t know who they were. They threw me to the ground and someone dug a knee into the back of my chest and I couldn't breathe. I thought HYDRA had come for me and I thought Sam was letting them take me—they were police, but by the time we got to the station, I’d gotten lost and forgotten that—that—'

Steve faltered, his eyes searching the room aimlessly as he tried to fish something out of his leaky head. He said, 'I don't know what I forgot because I can't remember the car ride anymore, but, but I knew something was wrong—then they showed me all these _pictures_ —'

With even the mention of the evidence they’d shown him, Steve’s voice started creeping towards hysterical. Bucky hated that the police had shown him things so explicit, things his mind had been broken to forget and had to be fixed properly before he should try remember. Bucky thought back to when Steve had first insisted he was ready to be released as an outpatient. It had been the urgent feeling Steve had that he should be helping take down HYDRA; frankly, Bucky thought Steve really would be able to handle combat like what they had done in the war. Steve had to know that now, too, that he couldn't pick up a gun and expect himself not to be repulsed by memories he couldn't control but HYDRA bases would force to the surface. Pictures hurt him like this; how could he face the places he was stored and prepared like a weapon without being hurt worse?

'Sh, I know, I know,' Bucky said instead, tucking him back into a hug. Steve huffed into Bucky’s chest, accepting the hug easily. Bucky remembered when Steve shied away from human comforts and compulsively and unconsciously blurted Bucky’s name over and over instead of recognizing the man in front of him. Steve had come a long way already. Bucky didn't know how much further his partner could go.

'I’m OK,' Steve said into Bucky’s shirt. Bucky found he couldn’t let go; he apparently needed this hug as much as Steve did. 'It was just hard. I couldn't understand what was happening, and now that I’m—lucid, I guess?—that’s frustrating. I don't remember what happened clearly. I was scared and I couldn't breathe. It’s over now.'

'Yeah,' Bucky agreed, releasing him, but keeping him close. 'You accepted a pardon?' Bucky asked him, searching his face. Steve nodded, smiling hesitantly, like he wanted Bucky to be proud and chirp mazel tov. Bucky couldn’t do that; he had to be honest about the fact the pardon broke his heart. 'Steve, you’re not guilty.' Steve shook his head. He wanted to pull away; Bucky could feel it without Steve even moving. He let go.

'Of course I am,' Steve said.

'It wasn’t you—'

'It wasn’t my _choice_ , but it _was_ me,' Steve said. 'I should’ve been stronger. I should have done more—Hell, I should have found a way to kill myself instead of letting them make me—'

'Steve!'

The admonishment broke out of him without permission, but, Jesus, he couldn’t hear Steve say things like that. It was an awful thing to imagine, if, when Steve had gained enough control over the programme, he had killed himself instead of saving Bucky from the water and helping Insight fail. He couldn't stand imagining Steve gaining enough control and killing himself to spare others while Bucky had been gone, frozen; maybe it was selfish and wrong, but he couldn't stomach the idea. He pictured, even if it didn’t make too much sense, Steve hanging from tree branches like the thin bodies they would find in German forests along routes that transported people like cattle from one camp to another.

'I’m sorry,' Steve said immediately. 'That was unfair. I just mean that—' Steve shook his head again, looking away. Bucky sighed.

‘They showed me things, Bucky. They showed me—a mission where the asset let the third target live. My medic training had popped up in the back of the asset’s mind after the parents were killed; I saw the bleeding and something said, _put pressure on it; stop it, save her._ I went to the rendezvous to report it, without killing their kid too. I could've—wasn’t that a choice?'

'No.' Steve looked at him, something heavy behind his eyes. Bucky said, 'Steve, _Jesus_ , no. Look, I’ve—Sorry—I’ve read that mission folder; you reported a glitch, not a choice. There were code words they’d given you which meant _choice_. You didn't report those; you reported a _glitch_.'

'It feels like deciding,' Steve admitted. 'It felt like deciding and it's—fucking shameful. Shouldn’t I have—Why didn’t I save everyone?'

'You couldn’t,' Bucky whispered. 'You couldn’t have saved everyone, Steve. Even I can’t save everyone.'

'Yeah,' Steve agreed. 'But I saved that kid. I should've saved other people too. But now, when Melissa releases me, there will be a truth commission instead of a trial.'

'That’s good, right?' Bucky asked, making sure. If Steve were afraid, they couldn’t celebrate tonight. They’d wait until he wasn’t afraid. But Steve nodded, and Bucky grinned.

'Mazel tov,' Bucky said. Steve beamed, then attached himself to Bucky again, winding his arms around Bucky’s chest and holding him tightly, like one of them might dissolve or drift away.

'I’m proud of you,' he told Steve, kissing the top of Steve’s hair. 'I’m so fucking proud of you. No matter what, you know that, right?'

'I know,' Steve promised. 'I love you too.'

^^^

Sam closed the fridge quietly, his sandwich plate balanced on top of the beer can he held in the other hand. He felt less and less like a guest in Steve and Bucky’s apartment in New York; even tho he still lived part time in DC—he wasn’t ready to move away from his sisters’ kids, not even if life in New York was shaping up to be pretty swell—he had his own room here and it often felt, at the end of the day, like coming home.

He wouldn’t have noticed Bucky was still up but for the flicker of light from the balcony, the light darkening completely for a second, drawing Sam’s eye. It was flickering visibly only now that Sam was looking for it. He sighed. He hoped Bucky wasn’t doing what he thought Bucky was doing.

Sam crept thru the dark living room, wondering if Steve was asleep in his room still; JARVIS hadn’t said anything. He peeked thru the glass, spotting Bucky on the balcony’s wicker couch, with a laptop playing the now-online footage of Steve’s arrest.

Footage of Steve’s interment was online now too; reel by reel, the Polish record hoard was being digitized and dumped into the databases the Avengers had set up for public and official use. Sam didn’t know a better word for what the videos showed than _internment_ ; not all of it was documentation of programming, or surgery, or testing. Some of it was just footage of handlers interacting with the Winter Soldier in different ways and languages, thruout the years. Some of it was just footage of men begging for death in Azzano, in the factory cages or the labs where Zola tortured and murdered. Some of it was reels and reels of Azzano experimentees' skin growing back and being flayed away, of Steve’s face wet with renewing tears as screams rang across the film from beyond him.

Bucky was watching the arrest footage again, courtesy of someone’s shaky cellphone. The cops, from the video, really seemed to burst out of the crowd without warning; Sam had seen them coming and the only warning in the video was Sam trying to pull Steve behind himself before one of the four cops yanked Sam away from Steve. That panicked Steve more than the cuffs had; he hadn’t known what to make of someone pulling Sam away, hadn’t known what to make of Sam letting them.

Sam hated himself for it, but he hadn’t decided to try to put up a fight against legitimate officers, even if their arrest warrant would be invalidated by Harieth less than a day later. Steve healed quickly but that wasn't the point; Sam was afraid the cops would shoot him if Sam tried their evasive manoeuvres, the ones they practiced in case HYDRA came after him.

Steve had reached for Sam when strangers burst out of the crowd, clearly coming for him; Sam hadn’t known how to defend Steve from a threat when the threat was law enforcement who were supposed to stay backed the hell off. The cops clearly took Steve’s panic as evasive action; two of the cops took him down roughly, sweeping his feet out without resistance. Sam couldn’t hear from inside but he remembered the gasps of the crowd when the cops smashed Steve into the marble floor; he remembered the awful noise of Steve’s metal shoulder hitting the fancy tile thru his clothes. He remembered the even worse noise of pain and surprise that had broken out of Steve, at the impact and then at the sensation of being pinned so aggressively.

The camera jerked as people at the gala tried to move away, creating a berth around the scene to be filmed, and bumped the filmographer. Whoever was filming did not retreat from the chaotic scene. The cops cuffed Steve’s hands behind his back, a pointless restraint Sam knew had only served to scare Steve; one of cops pinned their knee into Steve’s rib cage, his hand heavy on the back of Steve’s head. Sam remembered the sound Steve had let out when that knee drove into his ribs. The cops hauled him by grips to his feet. For a brief second, the video showed Steve’s frightened expression, before he was tugged away.

Sam pushed open the sliding door of the balcony as the cops began pulling Steve away, one still holding Sam back and away, even as he protested right into the officer’s face. He’d been arrested that night too, but his charges of interfering with an investigation were dropped almost the second he arrived at the station.

Bucky started at the sound of the door, the same fight or flight reflex of any veteran who wasn’t used to being at home. He calmed more quickly than he used to, settling back down into the couch quickly enough that Sam was more struck by the unusual cigarette in Bucky’s hand than the start at all.

‘The smoke on our clothes bothers Steve a bit,’ Sam reminded Bucky, because they had quit together for that reason among many others.

‘I know, I know, I know,’ Bucky bitched, pushing the laptop off his lap and onto the side table to both pull his pack from his pocket and to make room for Sam beside him. Bucky muted the video, which stopped Steve’s voice, calling out for Sam. Sam put his beer and plate on the table at his elbow.

‘Smoking is bad for us,’ Sam reminded Bucky, who bitched the same few words at him in chant. Sam took the offered cigarette and pulled his own lighter from his sweater’s pocket. It was oddly, idiotically sweet, that Bucky had started smoking menthols from sharing with Sam. ’You’ve been watching the videos again,’ Sam guessed.

Bucky hummed his agreement. The arrest video came to an end. Youtube tried to autoplay a compilation someone had made of the Soviets who first began experimenting with the recalibration machine after leaving Steve, one-armed and broken, in pitch-black isolation for almost a full year. The playlist was called ‘electroconvulsive torture’. The Soviets built two generations without Howard Stark’s help. Bucky stopped the autoplay; in the cover frame, Steve lay bound in front of a bank of ancient monitors; the Soviet doctors watched him seize and the metal encasing Steve’s head showed them on pixelated monitors what damage they were inflicting.

Howard Stark had been the one to figure out how to direct it, use it to create compulsions and programming and not just strip away memory and myelin, when Arnim Zola brought him into HYDRA.

Bucky had said once that he should have shot Zola on that train, never given him the chance to go to trial, which ultimately had allowed the US to recruit him, alive and well, in the fifties. Sam hated himself for it a little bit: he wished Bucky hadn't shot Zola but had killed him slowly, as revenge for a yet-undone crime. Sam hoped the cancer Zola had died of had tortured him too.

‘You probably shouldn’t watch those,’ Sam told him. ‘That can’t be good for you either.’

‘Yeah,’ Bucky agreed. ‘I oughta stop watching them. It’s an invasion of Steve’s privacy; being his partner doesn’t give me any special right to any of this. I shouldn’t—He should get to decide what I know about what they did to him, and I should keep my fucking worry to myself sometimes. It’s not like knowing what happened even makes a difference; it just keeps me up.’ Sam thought about how Steve and Bucky functioned differently, on adjusted meal and sleep schedules because of the serum. He wondered how many days a week Bucky went without sleep.

‘Why you out here smoking in the first place?’ Sam asked instead. ‘He had a bad day; he usually wants you there when it’s time to sleep. He really sleeps better on nights you’re here.’

‘He didn’t recognise me when I went in,’ Bucky said quietly. For a moment, they smoked consolation cigarettes in silence.

‘I mean, you’re right,’ Bucky added; ‘on most of the bad days, he still reaches out for me, but right now, he’s reaching and he doesn’t even know—’ Bucky stopped, looking away and pulling far more of his cigarette than Sam’s lungs could take, especially now that they’d cut so far down. He exhaled an impressive cloud in an anxious huff.

‘This is very personal, and I’m sorry; I shouldn’t just dump this on you because you’re—around,’ Bucky fumbled, and Sam listened, looking out over the city, because sometimes people didn’t need help or even to let anything go; sometimes they just needed to get it out. Bucky needed to get it out. He leaned his shoulder into Bucky, giving him just that shred of comfort.

Bucky blurted, ‘I mean, it’s easier now, than when we first found him, got him into deprogramming. Before, he didn’t want me more than anyone else, which was hard, and when he started wanting me again, I couldn’t trust that he knew he had any choice about what kind of comfort I gave him. All I know how to do is comfort him like I used to and suddenly I didn't know if I were allowed. He used to be so headstrong and suddenly I couldn't trust he knew he could say no, or say yes, or say maybe later.’ Bucky held them in a tense silence, and eventually Sam tried to soothe him somehow.

‘Difficulties in the bedroom are really normal in veteran households,’ Sam offered. ‘PTSD affects both partners—’

‘I’m not even talking about _sex_ —I’m talking about how you show—I wouldn’t hold you the way I hold him, not really,’ Bucky said, looking over to Sam. Sam understood suddenly at the look in Bucky’s eyes. He thought about the people he’d loved romantically in the past, the people he loved now.

One year, home on furlough, he’d heard at different times the story of his sister and then-girlfriend’s car-totalling crash; the women had been Christmas shopping together and a bad luck-black ice moment had spun them into a guardrail, a light post, and then sent them into a ditch. Both women had gotten a bit shaky retelling the moment the car dropped off the road and smashed thru the post.

He’d held them differently when he’d hated that and wanted them to feel safer. He wouldn’t hold girlfriends like he held his sister. Girlfriends would have found it patronizing; she was his baby sister so of course she was his to protect, at least a little. He wouldn’t hold his sister like a girlfriend either; it would be too soft, placing his hand on her ribcage and holding like that, too intimate.

Bucky looked away again, watching his own smoke curl before staring out of the city. It was quite the view.

‘I couldn’t trust he knew he was allowed to refuse anything so I couldn’t offer anything he didn’t reach for on his own,’ Bucky explained. ‘I couldn’t give—but when he first came home, Steve didn’t know how to ask for help—God damn, he couldn’t always ask for _food_ ; we had to have JARVIS put him on a fucking _schedule_ —he was _suffering_ , and there was nothing I could do but stand there. So. It was fucking hard.’

‘It’s easier now, mostly. He knows he’s not an asset, or a soldier, now; he just gets confused,’ Bucky finished. ‘I know when he’s reaching for me, it’s because he wants to, even if he doesn’t remember my name. Most times, now, it really is just a name he doesn’t know; he knows it’s me. Tonight, he didn’t know me, not even a little, which is—it's hard to see him stare at me like it isn't my God damn house and our God damn home.’

‘It makes me feel like I’m taking advantage. I hate feeling like that and I feel—guilty,’ Bucky supposed, ‘because it’s selfish to hate it.’ Bucky shook his head again, uncomfortable. ‘His recovery should be about him, not me.’

‘It’s selfish, but I don’t want to go in there when he doesn’t know me,’ Bucky finished, pushing out his smoky near-filter in the ashtray on the side. Sam passed him a sandwich. Bucky thanked him quietly, complimenting his choice of toppings.

‘I don’t think it’s selfish,’ Sam said. ‘It’s not really about you not wanting to go in there; it’s about you not wanting to threaten his autonomy. You don’t want to hurt him. It’s a little misguided maybe.’ He put out his own half-cigarette and cracked open his beer. He took a sandwich half for himself. When Bucky didn’t say anything else, he chirped: ’You owe me a sandwich.’

‘I owe you a lot more than that,’ Bucky agreed, around a mouth full of rye, mortadella, and cheese.

^^^

Tony nearly jumped out of his skin when his blasting music cut out. He almost bashed his head against the raised hood of the hot rod he was working on as he churned thru math in the back of his mind. 'J?' he called.

'Captain Barnes calls, sir,' JARVIS said. The lab intercom buzzed.

'Yo,' Bucky said, the modern slang picked up from Sam and Rhodey quite hilarious in his outdated Brooklyn accent.

'Yo,' Tony called back.

''S just me,' Bucky said unnecessarily. 'You got a minute?' Tony made a mental note of which new bolt in the battery housing wasn't yet tightened, telling JARVIS to let Bucky in. He tossed his wrench over to DUM-E; DUM-E scooped it up with a pleasant whirl, tucking it back onto the rolling equipment table next to the car, where it lived between two other sizes.

The lab door was unlocked to Bucky, always, but Tony appreciated the way Bucky knocked thru the intercom all the same. He didn’t mind Bucky appearing unexpectedly, not really, but it was still nice to have control over the unlocked door.

'Yo,' Bucky said again when he wandered into and spotted Tony in the chaos of the lab. 'You seen Steve today?' he asked. 'I haven’t seen him since, uh, quite early this morning, actually.'

'Nah,' Tony replied. 'I’ve been here since 'bout nine. You know he never comes in here if he can help it.'

JARVIS wouldn’t help people look for each other without their explicit permissions; if Steve didn’t want JARVIS to be helpful, Bucky would have to wander around the Tower checking hiding spots—like the lab, the small roof between their balcony and unit two’s, the closet of Sam’s sometimes-bedroom in Cap’s apartment, the public observation deck after-hours—until Steve decided to turn up.

'Yeah,' Bucky agreed, looking around absently. He sighed, shoving his hands into his pockets. 'I don’t know where he is,' he said, stating the obvious. 'I mean, he’s around here somewhere, or JARVIS would have sounded the alarm, but he’s hiding from me, I think. All the places he lets me find him are empty. And he’s been quiet all week.'

'Something up?' Tony asked.

'Nah,' Bucky said. He didn’t leave, so Tony waited. 'No,' he said again. 'I don’t know. There's the strike Wednesday; we're gonna be away for a few days, maybe nine. Nat's coming with us, so he's gonna be alone with Sam.' DUM-E whirled and wheeled over to Bucky, bumping his elbow. 'Hey, buddy, how you doing?' Bucky asked the bot, patting its head. DUM-E preened under the attention. 'I know; I won’t see you for a while. It’ll be rough, bud.'

'What’s up?' Tony asked again. Bucky sighed, giving in, opening up. He didn't used to do this with Tony, when Tony had first brought him home and away from SHIELD. He used to prickle and shut down. When he first started warming up to Tony, there were a terrible few times when Howard’s name had popped out of Bucky’s mouth instead, mostly by habit but also by the shadow of Howard in Tony’s looks. Tony hadn’t known he had the same sense of humour as his dad; he’d never seen his dad’s after the war, not really. Bucky had seen their similarities immediately; he’d crashed with Howard young and vibrant and had woken up to a friend’s son, older than himself.

'He’s—well, he’s been having a bad couple of days,' Bucky said. 'But we’ve got an official release date from Melissa. Firm date: she gave it to the courts and everything. Apparently, this is as good as it gets. Fortnight from yesterday.' Bucky offered a smile, just a quirk of one corner of his mouth. It made him look incredibly sad.

'Wow, seems soon,' Tony said. Bucky nodded. He sat on one of Tony’s work stools. 'So? Where are they dragging you guys for the trial?'

'It’s an international truth commission, not a trial,' Bucky corrected. 'Steve's never had a trial, even tho he was pardoned as tho he were guilty—'

'Yeah, yeah,' Tony said, cutting his friend off. He’d heard that speech a hundred times. Tony had heard it so often he felt it as truth; he’d even given a version of the speech to Pepper, ranting much to her dismay in their bedroom.

'Yeah,' Bucky agreed, shutting up. Tony wondered if it were difficult to be so angry about something everyone else kept defending as the best case scenario. 'I don’t know. We’ll have two months between his release and the beginning of the commission,' Bucky said, 'to move there and get settled. They’ll let us know soon. I hope it’s DC, even if having the commission in America doesn’t make it easiest politically. It would just—It’d be nice. Peggy’s there and Steve hasn’t been allowed to visit her yet. We’re running out of time with her.'

Tony didn’t know how to offer his sympathies for that; he hadn’t ever visited Peggy in her hospice, hadn’t seen her since a few years after his parents’ death. He’d seen her a lot, growing up, nearly as often in his teen years as he saw his father. She had never talked about Captain America; Tony didn’t know who she’d been to Bucky. He’d thought until he’d found out about Steve that she had been Bucky’s long-lost love; he still talked about her in the soft voice he used for grieving.

'And I bought the apartment from my landlord after the Winter Soldier shot thru the walls and Fury ruined my floor with his blood,' Bucky added. 'And s’all fixed up now, real nice.'

'Do you nerds not like the apartment I’ve given you?' Tony joked.

'We love it,' Bucky said honestly. 'Goodness, it’s incredible. We feel lucky every day. Sometimes having that much space is a bit much, is all. It’s so different. After the Crash—I mean, we grew up during the Great Depression. My family recovered; my dad got another good job after a few years. Missus Rogers stayed poor, she and Steve. Neither of them were—you know, Steve had a bad heart; looking back, I think he got his asthma from his ma. And she was nervous, always nervous.'

'Maybe 'cause her kid was the embodiment of a shitty immune system,' Tony said, even if he knew that type of chronic nervousness sometimes had no cause but simply leached energy from its host. 'Must've be hard on her. Pepper goes crazy enough worrying about me. If we had a kid—' He trailed off. He thought of the anger he held for his father, the _how dare you?_ which burned in him like brand, always red-hot if one cared to look or poke it. His anger came from the fact he couldn’t imagine his hypothetical kid doing anything so terrible for Tony to be as distant and disappointed as Howard had been, or as Howard had seemed. He couldn’t imagine letting that kid feel like the unconditional love of a parent was denied to them. Tony felt more protective of his hypothetical child than he’d ever felt his father being of him. That was a hard feeling to reconcile.

'I haven’t seen Pepper in a while; everything all right?' Bucky asked. 'You doing all right lately, Tone?' Tony nodded.

'Yeah, sunshine in paradise,' he said. 'She’s just outta town for work.' Pepper was mad at him; she’d assumed the suits would be put to pasture again once HYDRA was well and truly dead and he’d corrected her assumption a few nights ago. He didn’t know how he could stop, especially once HYDRA was gone. There was going to be a vacuum of evil-doing, criminals chomping at the bit to fill the void, and if Iron Man and the Avengers weren’t standing to guard it, something worse would take HYDRA’s place. He hadn't had a suit when SHIELD had fallen. Bucky had been arrested while Tony watched from the Tower. Bucky almost died, fell out of a bombed-out carrier and almost drowned. Steve almost disappeared. Tony almost hadn't made it in time.

It would be naïve to stop. It would be impossible.

Pepper had gone to work from DC.

Maybe Pepper was right and it wasn’t fair to ask her to live her life in the same limbo a superhero did, but he didn’t know what else he could do. DUM-E passed Bucky a wrench from the second shelf of Tony’s worktable. Bucky took the aimless gift and thanked the robot.

'I’m glad things are going well with Pep,' Bucky said. 'And the apartment, it's, you know, it’s wonderful. It’s just so wonderful that sometimes it’s stressful.' Bucky gave him a shrug. His shoulders were huge. Tony remembered when all Bucky wore were button-downs and slacks; the longer he was awake the more comfortable he became in today’s fashions.

'Like the grocery store?' Tony guessed, thinking of the panic Bucky had had when he’d wandered into a practical warehouse filled to the absolute brim with fresh, enormous produce and bread and milk and over a dozen kinds of honey: more food than he’d ever seen in his life. Bucky hummed his agreement. 'So why you looking for your pocket-sized partner? Y’lonely and horny?'

'Wow, you can fuck right off,' Bucky said without malice.

'You’re welcome,' Tony replied.

'I haven’t seen him or heard a peep since, like, eight. I went for my conference calls at the office and the apartment was empty when I came back,' Bucky said, simply a little concerned. He shrugged again. 'Maybe he just wanted to be alone.'

'Maybe he’s trapped in the vents,' Tony offered. Bucky rolled his eyes.

'How are you doing, man?' Bucky asked again. 'You look kinda frazzled.'

'Frazzled?' Tony echoed. 'Nah, I’m fine.'

Tony was fine. He hadn't had a significant panic attack in weeks. He'd calmed down pretty quickly from his last little one. It was hard to shut off his mind and fall asleep sometimes, because his body felt like it was vibrating apart and his brain wouldn't shut down, but the tone of the insomnia wasn't as bad as it had been. Pepper was safe, at the very least.

It didn't matter anyways. Pepper was in DC.

'All right,' Bucky agreed. 'I’m gonna keep looking, I guess; let you work. If Steve comes up here, for some reason, will you tell him I’m done for the day and we should—well, just tell him I don’t have any more work to do today.' Bucky gave DUM-E a farewell pat; DUM-E dipped its claw sadly.

'So you are lonely and horny,' Tony guessed again.

'Go fuck yourself, seriously,' Bucky called casually as he left. Tony chuckled to himself. JARVIS knew him too well; he pulled up on the nearest computer screen the math Tony had been percolating in the back of his mind as he tuned his car. He sighed, staring at the energy transfer threshold. He wanted this battery to work well. It was more efficient than the last model, sure, but it wasn’t as efficient as it could be. He typed in adjustments, scowling at his fingers as he did.

'Thanks for not telling him I was here,' a deep voice said from only five feet away.

'Holy shit, shortstop,' Tony barked, spinning and searching out Steve. 'I did not know you were in here. Fuck.' The kid was sitting in plain-sight now, at a work stool, fiddling with a line-work hologram of the hot rod on the wide worktable between him and Tony. Tony stared; he shoved his glasses into his hair.

'Oh,' Steve said. He poked at the hologram again before elaborating. 'I’ve been here all day. I didn’t think I was hiding. I was just quiet.' Tony shook his head, wiping his hands on a rag DUM-E passed to him, sensing his break. The little guy whirled off to try to fetch Tony a hot chocolate or a bagel.

'Well, you don’t like it up here, so I don’t generally look for you when I come in,' Tony said. 'Usually, people don’t hang out silently for hours at a time.'

'You said I was welcome any time,' Steve said.

'You are,' Tony said. He forced a smile. He knew it looked forced but maybe the former assassin couldn’t tell. Steve blinked at him too intentionally, like the brain-damaged oddball he was, squeezing his eyes so-tightly shut for a brief second. 'Did you eat today?' Tony asked, without realising it until it was out of his mouth. Steve blinked at him again; this time, Tony read surprise.

'No,' Steve admitted.

'You should. You’re supposed to eat a lot,' Tony said. Steve left the hologram alone, pulling his hands back to his diaphragm, his fingers braceleting his prosthetic. Tony wouldn't miss it when that nervous gesture finally died. 'Um, so, what, you’re up here hiding from your boyfriend? He’s looking for you, you know.'

''M not hiding,' Steve said. 'No, I wanted to talk to you. It's hard, so it took a while.'

'What about?' Tony wondered. 'How’s the arm?'

'It’s fine, um,' Steve said. 'I had something else to tell you.'

'Oh?' Tony asked. Steve nodded, but then didn’t say anything. Tony waited as long as his limited patience could wait; he eventually slid his reading glasses on. He turned back to his computer. He kept glancing over at Steve, to let him know he was still listening. Steve squinted at nothing, peering around the lab as tho something could give him an out now that he was actually talking to Tony.

'Howard was my friend,' Steve said after a very long time. Tony’s hands froze on his keypad, hovering over home row and unsure how to possibly continue if this was the subject that would fill the air around them. Steve glanced at Tony, gauging his reaction, before looking away. Tony stared at the small profile, lit oddly in the nighttime work light of the shop. He filled the silence.

'Howard was my father,' Tony said. Steve nodded. There was another long silence, but Tony didn’t find his attention straying; the numbers in the back of his head stayed still and quiet. Nothing hummed. Tony watched Steve, watched his face as Steve worked thru whatever had driven him up here this morning to lurk for hours. His heart was getting closer to its sleeve every day; now, he frowned, his eyes tracing something that wasn’t in front of him. He looked sad, Tony could see, but also confused, like pieces of string were out of place and too long in the middle.

'I killed him,' Steve said, his voice as heavy as a confession. 'And your mother. You look like her, more than your dad.' Bucky thought the opposite, had told Tony he had his mother mostly in his colouring, that he was clearly Howard's son. Tony jerked his eyes away, as if that could shield him from the conversation he was about to have.

'I keep trying to think of her name,' Steve added, and it sounded almost like a question.

'Maria.' Tony had to clear his throat roughly to keep speaking. 'Was Maria Delgado, before she married my dad.'

'Maria Delgado Stark.'

'Yeah.'

Tony couldn’t help the deep ache that cracked thru him at the idea of his mother snuffed out because of his father’s hubris or fear or ignorance.

When Bucky had first told Tony what had happened to his parents, when the knife their deaths had put in his chest was so unexpectedly twisted and yanked out to let Tony bleed anew, when Steve had been barely a person, just a victim who would be so _easy_ to blame, so easy to _hate_ , when he’d been a mere stranger, a story, and a threat: then, Tony hadn’t blamed him, not really. Part of his heart couldn’t help but hate Steve for it, viscerally, but that part was a father’s son, his mother’s favourite boy, not anything else.

'I just—I thought I should tell you,' Steve said. 'The commission is gonna ask; I wanted you to know 'cause I told you, not 'cause the commission asked me.'

'I did know,' Tony said, his voice softer than he meant it, but steadier than he had thought it would be. Steve looked at him again, really looked this time. He was surprised that Tony knew, the expression clear as day. Tony explained: 'Bucky found out when he was investigating the attempt on Fury, right before he found out you were alive. He told me ages ago, first night you were in the Tower.'

'You knew,' Steve said.

'Yeah.' Steve’s eyes were bright; he didn’t try to hide the burgeoning, involuntary tears.

'You helped me anyway?'

'Of course.' Tony meant it; when he'd seen Bucky's best friend alive and computerized and breaking down, of course he had helped. Bucky would do anything for Rhodey too.

'I’m so sorry,' Steve said. 'I—I didn’t even know it was him; I couldn’t recognize him and even if I did, I don't think I could have stopped it.'

'He built a good machine,' Tony agreed. He’d read too many files about how the maintenance chair worked, how it stripped memory, how it installed compulsions, how it installed scarring that would cause pain if the Soldier tried to decide too big of a thing on his own. He'd seen them in person, on the strikes he went on, helping Bucky with HYDRA. Starks always made the best of the best; the recalibration machine would be a Nobel feat if it weren’t so goddamned evil.

'I’m so sorry, Tony,' Steve said; 'you have no idea.'

'I know,' Tony said, wishing it were something he could brush off and brush away. 'It’s OK. I don’t—' He broke off. He didn’t blame Steve; he didn’t, not really. He didn't. He shouldn't. The blame he felt for Steve was the reaction of a broken heart, not a real emotion. It stopped him all the same. 'It’s not your fault. My father shouldn’t have been working for HYDRA. He shouldn’t have risked my mom like that; he should’ve known better.'

'He was risking me, too,' Tony added quietly, thinking of it, 'but for whatever reason, HYDRA didn’t want you to wipe out the entire Stark family. Needed someone making weapons, I guess.' He wondered how badly he’d been played. He wondered how many of the conflicts fought with Stark weaponry were HYDRA’s orchestration. He wondered how many conflicts, thanks to Uncle Obie, had been fought with Stark weaponry on both sides.

'I’m glad,' Steve told him. 'I’m glad I didn’t have to kill you. I’m glad you’re my friend now.'

'Me, too,' Tony sighed.

'But _Howard_ was my friend too,' Steve said, his voice cracking more honestly than Tony had ever heard anyone's in his life. 'I shouldn't have done—'

'It’s not your fault,' Tony offered again, unable to hold it back.

'Of course it is, at least a little,' Steve said.

'No, I know how badly they broke you to make you do these things. I know how badly he broke you. Dad shouldn’t— _He_ shouldn’t have done it, Steve.' Steve didn’t say anything. He stared. Tony met his eyes; Steve didn’t break his gaze away but held himself steady. Tony found himself shaking his head at nothing. 'He shouldn't have done what he did to you; it was cruel and it was evil. You didn’t have a choice. He did. He had so many choices. He could have freed you any day, at a risk, but he could have. He didn’t. He worked for them until they killed him; he never made a choice to stop or to help you, or the world. He helped them do this to you; he helped HYDRA, not his friend.'

'I don’t know how it could have happened, really,' Tony said, bumbling. 'How he could do things like this—how he could have become a HYDRA operative. He was supposed to be—He won World War Two; he was my dad, the hero. He stood for the same things Captain America stood for, you know? He won the war. He wasn't supposed to make the next one happen.'

Tony looked away for a brief second to take off his reading glasses and wipe his eyes. 'He wasn’t, you know, father of the year or anything, but I didn’t think—I didn’t think he was capable of real cruelty like this. I didn’t think he could do this, and—I mean, I’ve met you; I’ve seen what he did to you, up close.'

Steve didn’t wipe his eyes; Tony couldn’t even tell if Steve knew he was crying. He’d never had someone watch him like Steve was watching him now. It felt like every molecule of Tony was being recorded, committed too intentionally to a shattered memory.

'I’ve seen your brain scans and X-rays; I’ve read every file he ever wrote about you, every little thing my father did to you,' Tony said, feeling like he was apologizing, somehow. 'It’s horrible. It's awful. I don’t know how he coulda done this. I really don’t.' He breathed heavily and wished he could haul himself back together, every atom Steve was memorizing.

'Anyone can do this,' Steve offered, like that could possibly be a comfort. 'Anybody is capable of anything, really. I wonder how he could have done it to me, not how he could have done it at all.' That felt like a punch to the gut, like a stab that Steve didn’t intend to hurt but did, so badly.

'He was my friend, Tony,' Steve repeated. Tony felt his eyes prickle anew. 'And I killed him. I'm really sorry. I’m so sorry. There’s no way to make up for this, but I am sorry.'

''S OK,' Tony lied. Of course it wasn’t. Steve knew it wasn’t; Steve knew nothing could make this OK, just as well as Tony did. He seemed to realise his face was wet; he used the overlong sleeve of the cardigan he kept stealing from Bucky to wipe his face, using the sleeve that hung over his metal fingertips, hiding them. Tony spotted dozens of tiny rips in the sleeve, loose and ruined knits-and-purls of the machine-woven sweater. He frowned, a part of his brain spinning off; Steve had hesitantly mentioned the catching once.

'And, uh,' Steve went on, clearing his throat. 'It’s always worse for Bucky when he reads something than when I tell him something, so I thought I should—the commission is going to ask everything. If there’s anything you’d rather hear anything in person.' That jerked the little part of Tony’s brain right back, a less weaponized surface waylaid and forgotten.

Steve held his gaze easily; Steve, who had been easier to speak to like the very first, clumsy iteration of an AI system than as a person when Tony had first brought him to New York, held his gaze without looking away or hesitating. Steve didn’t waver.

Tony realised he was seeing the man Bucky had fallen in love with once upon a time, the Steve he’d been then: a man who did the right thing even when it hurt, who knew right and wrong, who owned up to what he had to, and spoke honestly no matter the cost. Bucky had fallen for someone who could admit his mistakes, someone who carried guilt as heavily as he did, but who somehow still believed in humanity, who thought people would do the right thing, even if he had lived and died at the hands of those doing the worst of wrongs. Bucky had fallen in love with someone who believed in his humanity, no matter what Bucky did. Steve probably still believed in Howard’s. Tony swallowed thickly.

'Did Obadiah know?' Tony asked, the image of the uncle he had trusted for so long, who had been profiteering and funding and supplying conflict even longer, leapt into his mind. How much of Tony's childhood might have been spent unwittingly been in contact with HYDRA agents? How long might Tony have done their bidding? If he hadn’t stopped making weapons, would his have been on Insight? If he’d been contracted to build it, would Bucky have been able to take it down?

'I don't know. I don't know who that is.'

'How—' Tony stopped, swallowed. He didn’t know if he wanted to know.

But of course Steve was right; when the commission would be broadcast, when reporters flooded his PR and his lobby with questions and cameras, when the commission arrived from Steve’s fall from a train in early May of forty-five to his parents’ death at the end of nineteen-ninety-one—and, _fuck_ , Steve had been a prisoner longer than Tony had been _alive_ —would Tony have the restraint not to watch?

'Was the crash enough to kill them?' Tony asked him. Steve didn’t look away.

'No,' Steve admitted, shaking his head once, to the left. 'It wasn’t meant to be.'

'Why not?' The question scraped out of his throat. It felt like he was speaking past a field of Clint’s arrowheads.

'The instructions were to ensure the primary target understood the cause of the crash,' Steve said. 'He was uninjured enough to push open the door and exit the vehicle. Injured enough he could not walk. He asked me to help his wife, before—the asset didn’t know, but I do: he recognized me, called me by name. I replaced his body in the driver's seat afterwards.'

Tony nodded, looking away. They had wanted his father to be afraid; they had wanted him to know his choices had killed him, killed his wife, that the friend he’d turned into a weapon had been turned onto him.

It almost felt _just_ ; Tony hated himself for thinking it more than he had ever hated himself before. It felt almost right that his father should have known unequivocally the consequences of his choices, at the very last moment he could. It was almost the worst thing Tony had ever felt: right after seeing Pepper fall to what should have been her death.

'Then how, uh,' Tony tried.

'I broke his skull. His death took forty-one seconds from the first hit,' Steve said. 'The car had been rigged to burn, so the injuries did not have to be perfectly consistent with crashing. Fire erases.'

'And my mom?' Tony managed. 'Did—Could you make it quick? Did she suffer?'

'I strangled her,' Steve said frankly and without hesitation. 'She was unconscious at second seventeen; she died after one hundred-three seconds.'

'Jesus fucking Christ,' Tony said, the curse breaking out of him. His hands snapped over his eyes; he was dying too, surely; he couldn’t take this. 'Shut up; stop.'

'I’m sorry. I'm so sorry, Tony.'

'Just—Shut the fuck up for a second, please. I just need a second—Jesus.' Tony didn’t blame Steve—he didn't; he was bigger than that; he had to be—but he couldn’t have let Steve confess the details of his parents' murder without that changing. He wasn’t that strong and no amount of engineering the suit would change that weakness. He sat in the silence and tried to breathe.

By the time he managed to look up again, Steve was gone. Tony was alone.

^^^

'How are you today, Steve?' Melissa asked. Steve shrugged, ignoring her. He didn't want to be at therapy today but he still didn't have a lot of choices. His security detail had dropped him off almost twenty minutes ago, but Melissa had let him sit quietly until now; Bucky called this type of quiet sitting sulking. Melissa let him get away with it from time to time, but not often. She understood somehow the tension the security escorts gave him. Sam did his best, but he was only part of the team, and he needed days off too. The attitude of Jefferson, who took lead when Sam was away, reminded Steve too acutely of certain handlers monitoring him on mission. The way Jefferson clapped a hand on Steve's shoulder whenever they were outside, the way he lead Steve into the car like he was under arrest, the physical contact itself, the proprietary hold, and the way his thumb touched Steve's bare skin above the collar: it left Steve unsettled. The unsettle was taking longer to ease out of Steve's skin since the arrest, ever since images of murder started bubbling up again without permission. Jefferson had brought him to therapy, was probably in the waiting room, would probably take him home, unless Sam appeared to relieve him. Steve couldn't remember the schedule today.

Melissa understood some days were bad days. Today wasn’t so bad but it was rough. He picked at the seam of his jeans; he needed a purposeless manual task in order to avoid Melissa's eyes. She wasn't pleased he was hiding in this way, he could tell without looking. He curled up a bit tighter in the corner of the couch they shared in her office. 'How do you feel today?' Melissa pressed.

'I don't know,' Steve said. If he ignored Melissa twice after sulking for so long, she would sigh almost silently; he was supposed to say hello and decide what they would talk about. He was not supposed to sulk and ignore her. He did not like her sighs. When he felt raw and strange like this, her sighs felt like punishment. He answered and she did not sigh.

'You don't know how you feel, or you don't know how to explain it?' Melissa asked. Steve itched with the feeling; he knew it intimately and too close under his skin. He was often able to explain things to her on good days. Now, he couldn't remember what had happened to make it a bad day, or when, but the tracks of lightning scars and burned scores inside his head and mind were sharper and more horrible than they had been. He had been having so many good days in a row. He had known the days of the week and Bucky's schedule; he'd gone to synagogue each Saturday long enough that the little ones expected him and saved stories from school for him. He'd been doing well.

Today, he didn't know what feeling was roiling inside of him and he hadn't known, for a terrifying few moments, who Bucky was when he had woken up next to a sleeping body. He had thought Bucky was a murdered corpse like the ones he had since the arrest started dreaming about in full, vivid colour. He had known he wasn’t the asset but had still somehow thought he had failed to return to rendezvous, had stayed at the crime scene past the acceptable window to stage evidence. He had had no idea he was in his own home in a brand new millennium. He had panicked then, even if it only lasted a few seconds. Bucky had told him when he'd asked at lunch.

Steve couldn't remember much else from the morning now. He could tell somehow that he hadn't been lost in the moment after the panic faded and Bucky brought him back, present and lucid. The morning just hadn't stored properly; the next thing he could remember now, he had been in the penthouse kitchen eating hard boiled eggs and aloo gobi with Tony and Bucky. Bucky had gone away after they ate; Steve hadn't gone with him.

Even on a bad day like today, Steve knew now he was a person, not a weapon, and that HYDRA did not hold him. He knew Melissa was kind and that he would not be reprogrammed. He didn't know how many bad days there had been since the arrest destroyed so much of his progress; he lost time more often with the evermore frequent interviews with his lawyer or the federal agents she would defend him from. He didn't know how to feel time passing anymore. The asset had known seconds, hours, days as they added up; mission success required timing and the asset could keep time impeccably. It was impossible to remember or think independently when keeping time second by second, like a machine, like a weapon; the effort needed of the asset to think even closely enough into the past to report missions before they were wiped from him was blindingly painful. When the programme had started to break down in earnest, Steve had lost that mechanical clock in his awareness. Recollection protocols—Memory, short- and long-term, began to rebuild too; he had to heal and to learn, but he could remember things on his own now. On good days, at least, he could sort thru his memories and know where he stood. When he couldn't recall things independently, on bad days, there was no way to get a sense of time. Time didn't exist really; there was no way to hold on to it.

'I don't know how to explain what I feel,' Steve said, and his voice was rough enough to reveal how much that upset him. Melissa needed to understand even if he didn't have enough words to tell her.

'Do you want to describe what you feel?' Melissa prompted. He huffed a heavy breath. Steve didn't like thinking about feelings. Feelings made people human and he'd been without them for so long; reviewing mission reports under investigation made clear how little humanity must remain in him. He had done so much damage but felt things now. It wasn't just that he got to be human when he'd destroyed so many others, forced to or not. It wasn't fair. He knew he should try to explain to Melissa; she could help. He didn't know how to explain it or if the differences mattered. It was hard to believe what he wanted mattered.

'It is not like angry,' he told her when he could manage to get his voice out, telling her what he felt. 'Angry is not—Angry _goes_ somewhere. Angry goes somewhere, right?'

'It certainly can,' Melissa agreed. Steve nodded.

'So it's not angry,' Steve said. 'It hurts like remembering does sometimes and like sad but not the same way. It feels like prickles and it makes me want to scream as loud as I can but it doesn't hurt bad enough to scream. I just want to scream because of the prickles.'

'What makes you feel this way?' Melissa asked. She often said that feelings didn't need names; Steve only had to try to understand what caused his feelings for them to be useful. He didn’t need to name them, but he needed to know which ones were distressing and which were positive, and which were negative but acceptable. Just like pain was a signal, emotions told him about the world around him and could teach him what choice was best. He thought, privately, that Normal People knew names of their feelings without trying to make lists and that Melissa had created a different normal for him. Normal People weren't confused by joy or impatience. Normal People felt and that was all. Steve felt and didn't know how.

'Being broken,' he supposed. 'It isn't angry. I don't know what it is.'

'It sounds like you might be frustrated, Steve,' she offered. 'What makes you feel like this? Try to be specific.'

'If I'm specific, I can remember,' Steve agreed. He was apparently detail-oriented; thinking of small thoughts was sometimes the only way he knew to find his way to big ones. 'It happens when people ask me things about what I did, about what they forced me to do. It happens when the arm cuts me and there's blood. Bucky's nightmares are bad and they wake him up at night. I don't know how to help him and that makes me feel prickles and it makes me want to scream.'

'Do Bucky's nightmares wake you up too?' Melissa asked. 'Uninterrupted sleep is very important to your brain. You might always be healing, neurologically; you might always need lots of sleep to prevent scar tissues from being able to disturb your thinking significantly. When you're well rested, all the elements of your serum work better too.’

'I'm not sleeping without him,' Steve said sharply. Melissa kept her face cool. Steve didn't think he ought to snap at her like this, but getting ice out of Bucky's chest was as important as Steve. She should know that. 'When he wakes up from a nightmare, he needs someone who knows what it's like to not be able to breathe. If I wake up, he's not alone. If I don’t wake up, I’m still there. He hears me breathing and he knows he's alive. I'm not sleeping anywhere else.' Melissa stayed quiet, giving him the silence to pull his words together. Steve didn’t know how she knew when he needed prompting and when he just needed space to gather his thoughts; it was an incredible skill.

'I hate sleeping far from him,' Steve admitted. He thought he remembered Melissa and her staff used to have to practically sweet talk him into the little cot at first; he hadn’t trusted it. He recognised now that ochre taste of sour at the back of his mouth had been the sensation of knowing someone was missing. He'd shared a bed with his mother most of his life, until she'd died and he'd moved into a bachelor's apartment with Bucky, slept curled up behind Bucky each night.

He remembered now that the sour taste had been a streak of anxiety from some part of his brain; he had known someone was missing. He'd never really slept alone, not until Bucky had gone to war and Steve’s money and time and health were tighter than they'd ever been.

'I never slept alone when I was little. I didn’t sleep alone even during the war. Even in Azzano, I could—I could hear the others crying or screaming. I wasn’t alone until they died, ’til Zola killed them all.' He popped the knuckles of his forefingers anxiously, thinking of the screams Patterson had let out when Zola's assistants realised his skin had started regenerating faster than even Steve’s.

Nothing else about the serum had worked on Patterson; Zola had him skinned over and over again, testing how often the serum could regenerate before letting Patterson succumb to shock, let him die. He hadn’t died or gone into shock; his skin had simply stopped growing back one night. He’d laid for days with a flayed chest which refused to scab or heal before the infection set in and Zola had him removed. Even after Patterson had died, there had been Davis, struggling to breathe, dying slowly over days from a stomach shot.

'I don’t like sleeping alone,' Steve said. 'I have bad dreams too. Bucky sleeps badly enough that mine wake him up before they get—He wakes me up, before it’s awful. I wish I could wake him up before his nightmares got bad too.'

'It's good to be supportive,' Melissa said. 'But don't forget to take care of yourself. You look very tired, Steve.'

‘I’m OK,’ he said. She looked skeptical. He realised he understood her expression. She didn’t have to explain herself; he understood her. He realised he, no matter how frustrated he got now, didn’t go out of his head when the prickles got painful or overwhelming. Sometimes he couldn't remember after the fact, but he stayed grounded in the moment all the same.

‘This isn’t something I can compromise on, Melissa,’ Steve admitted. ‘Sometimes you can’t compromise on stuff.’

'I don’t like feeling frustrated, tho,' Steve said, mimicking Melissa’s nomenclature. 'I don’t like feeling like being broken is never going to stop. I don't like feeling like this is as good as it gets.'

'It’s not a matter of being broken, Steve,’ Melissa said. He sighed. He knew this. She told him often that he wasn't really broken, that he was recovering, that he’d survived, that he was a survivor, that he didn’t have to identify as a victim if that didn’t help him. None of that mattered. What mattered was that he knew his brain used to work better than it did now. It used to hurt him less than it did now. Even if the doctors in his day had thought the asthma was the result of an addled and sick mind, he used to be able to think more clearly than he could now. Helping Bucky plan strikes, he could only begin tactical ideas before his brain would let him think no further. Bucky knew him well enough he could run with the threads; the ideas he formed felt like Steve's when they were done. Steve used to be smarter; he used to be able to figure things out independently, complicated things, and HYDRA had destroyed that ability so well that Steve didn't know if it'd ever come all the way back.

'I am getting better,' he agreed, because there was no point in being fatalistic. He was allowed to sulk—people needed to sulk, sometimes—but he had to remember that he had already come a long way. He didn’t get lost anymore. He didn’t forget that he was a person anymore; he only forgot names, dates not eras, details: he did not forget his personhood. It was less scary to have an empty drawer of memory sometimes, or to have a story with only a missing page, than it was to lose his sense of self. 'I know that, but it still—'

'What?' she prompted.

'It just sucks,' he said. 'It's not all going to get better. I thought it was. I thought I’d be able to help Bucky fight HYDRA.'

'You do help,' Melissa said. 'You plan, you liaise, you contribute.'

'But I don’t fight,' Steve said. 'I thought—when I came back, I thought I would. I thought I’d be able to, but now that I’m an outpatient, that I can know more and remember more day-to-day—I can’t. I can’t stomach the idea of doing it anymore. I remember so much more about what they made me do, and if I go up against them, it’ll—I can’t do it, not really, and I thought I could.'

'I guess—Before, I didn't have enough of a grasp of myself to know what was missing, or how far I'd come. I was just—I don't know; I didn’t know who I'd been Before or who I was then. Now I can know those things and so I can know they're not the same.'

'You're not alone in feeling this,' Melissa offered.

'What do you mean?' Steve asked. 'Is it 'cause of the programming?' He remembered feeling an odd type of comfort knowing that some of the compulsions of his programming were not only a typical mechanism of brainwashing, but that some of the other patients in Melissa’s care had the exact same compulsions from very different programming. It had been oddly comforting to know he wasn’t alone; he might be a unique specimen of HYDRA’s but he might not be a freak.

'No, this is something called ambiguous loss,' Melissa explained. 'It's a common phenomenon amongst people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries. A lot of programming is psychological; in addition to that, yours was very physically based, Steve.'

'They cut my head open over and over,' Steve blurted.

'Yes, they did,' Melissa comforted. 'Functionally, most of your programming was a measured and intentional brain injury. They used electroconvulsive treatments to strip your amygdala and memory centres; they used actual separation of neural pathways to impede your ability to think. You know this.'

'I remember,' he said.

'This type of frustration, that you can't go back to who you were,' Melissa began.

'It's common,' Steve supplied. 'We've had this conversation before.'

'Yes,' Melissa admitted. Steve looked away, shaking his head at himself. The prickling feeling renewed in full force, almost burning him from within. 'Steve, it's all right. You're allowed to feel frustrated—'

'We've had this _exact_ conversation before,' Steve said, snapping again at Melissa even tho he shouldn’t; he shouldn’t. He pressed his face into his hands, unable to reconcile the vague memory of the conversation with the fact that he'd heard the word frustrated for the first time today. 'We’ve talked about this _exact same thing_ before and I can barely remember.'

'But you do remember,' Melissa said. 'You know time has gone by. You know you’ve heard of ambiguous loss. You can keep track of how often Bucky sleeps poorly. Look at all these things you can do.'

'We didn't talk about Bucky's sleeping last time,' Steve guessed, because that impression was missing from the vague, cloudy picture in his head.

'We did not,' Melissa agreed. 'You looked much less tired then.'

'I’m OK,' Steve said. Melissa gave a small nod, even if she didn’t look convinced. Steve watched her for a long time, trying to understand her expression. Melissa had cut her hair recently; the new fringe fell over her eyebrows. It was a new challenge. Steve would learn. He figured she wanted him to explain why he could be all right; he couldn’t deny he looked tired. He figured he did. He and Bucky were working hard. Bucky slept badly most nights and the anxiety of the approaching commission meant Steve often didn’t either. One of them almost always woke up the other. He shrugged, looking away.

'Sleeping alone would be worse.'

^^^

Steve felt badly watching Bucky crouch his neck in the plane and turn his shoulders to get down the tiny aisle. He wished Bucky had agreed to just let them drive, or take the train. He jammed himself into the tiny seat and they resolutely ignored the looks and whispers of the civilians who recognized them. Their hearing was better than most people realised; Steve's was artificial and Bucky's was the product of the serum. They heard every word whispered in the small space, would until the engines drowned most of it out.

'Isn't he dangerous?' a man asked his wife, settling into their seats four rows back. 'Should he be allowed on a normal plane?'

'I think that's why Captain America is with him,' his wife replied just as quietly and just as ineffectively. Steve could feel Bucky’s tension as heavily as he felt his own. He didn’t know if it was the plane or the people; he didn’t know if Bucky was annoyed people forgot they had been friends before the war, that of course Steve wasn’t dangerous, or if Bucky were already afraid, even with the plane attached to the gate still and the wheels firmly on ground.

'How do you think the TSA dealt with the arm?' the man giggled. 'Think it pops off?' he asked, then pitched his voice low then normally, playing a TSA agent and Steve. ' _"Uh, sir, could I get you to put that metal in a bin"? "Oh, yes": pop_!'

Steve flinched. Steve felt like a part of his stomach was dead and crawling. The arm wasn’t a joke; it was _dangerous_. It was a _weapon_. It was the most advanced technology of its kind; even the prototypes at the function at which Steve had been arrested hadn’t been like this. There were functionalities civilians didn’t need that he was stuck with. He could withstand thousands of pounds of force before the false joint might start to rip; it couldn’t pop off. He’d never be rid of it. The arm was a part of him and he’d never not be a monster. His spine, his shoulders: they’d been replaced with metal and magnet and he hated that as much as the American public hated the Winter Soldier.

Bucky knew what the flinch was for; he bumped his knee into Steve’s. It helped. The wife behind them laughed at the joke, brightly and sincere, not vindictive but shearing. They sounded happy. It sounded like they loved each other for real.

'Will you close the window?' Bucky asked him. 'I don’t wanna see out once we’re up.'

'Do you want the inside?' Steve asked, because it would be harder to see out the other windows if he sat closer to the wall. Bucky shook his head.

'Not unless it’s an emergency exit, which is—calming, I guess,' he admitted. 'No, I gotta be able to get out when I need to.' Steve slid the plastic shade down.

'I hate how hard it is,' Steve said, being hyper-delicate with the plastic. 'To not break stuff,' he clarified, when Bucky hummed. The shade clicked shut. 'You’re stronger than me so it’s probably worse; stuff normal people can’t lift is like holding a two-pound bag of flour. This is like dandelions.'

'I break pens all the time. I crushed a phone in front of Tony when I first woke up,' Bucky said, speaking low enough for only Steve. 'I was so afraid he’d be mad or think I was a freak; he started laughing so hard I thought he was gonna explode like the phone did.'

'He made you that case,' Steve said. Bucky nodded his agreement, trying to reach down but being to simply massive to do so in the coach seat.

'God damn it,' Bucky muttered, frustrated with his own size. He used to be smaller, Steve knew, and Steve had been even smaller still. It was hard to remember and was hard to conceptualize even then. After Rebirth, after Azzano, their height disparity had been slightly more, but Steve had been nearly as tall as Peggy. It had been hard to really figure. Besides, he could barely remember now.

‘We could have taken the train,’ Steve said.

‘The train required security staff and would've jammed you in an enclosed space with strangers for twice as long,’ Bucky pointed out. ‘People ask for pictures with me on trains; I've taken that exact line. On aeroplanes, they just stare and whisper.’

'Can you reach my knitting?' Bucky added. Steve twisted in his seat, reaching below Bucky’s legs. Bucky lifted the leg closest to Steve; Steve yanked Bucky’s knitting bag out easily, waited for Bucky to yank out the skein and the needles he’d needed, replacing the bag under the seat for him.

Bucky flew commercial whenever active quasi-military operations were not his final destination and liked to knit on planes to try to keep his mind occupied. He apparently never flew commercial without being recognized. The attention set off all sorts of alarms in Steve's head; the surreptitious gazes of a dozen people in an enclosed space felt like being a specimen again, like being the asset when new protocols were revealed to the people in charge, the people in dark windows at the top of the labs or the cells. He wondered if the way he couldn’t relax with their gazes on him was what flying were like for Bucky. He wondered if Bucky would ever go swimming ever again either.

He didn’t think he’d want to swim, if he had survived what Bucky had. The cold of the cryochamber had always bothered him more than the liquid they covered his body with; he wore the mask and besides, he was used to not being able to breathe. He was used to his lungs betraying him. Bucky had always been so healthy and strong. Bucky had been trapped like a bug under a pin and had drowned in the ice.

Once they were all neatly seated and the plane had taken off, attentions of dozens of strangers drifted away from Bucky and Steve and onto whatever entertainment the passengers had brought for themselves.

The first rattle of turbulence had been fine; the plane had rocked and rocked and rocked back. Bucky's hand had dropped his leading needle and seized the armrest. Steve met his eye but the plane flew level. Bucky let his lip out from under his nervous teeth. Eventually, Bucky went back to his work, stitching and stitching the delicate yarn. Steve missed knitting. He’d tried but the metal hand had ruined his project, snagging and splitting the strands of his yarn. He’d ripped out the few pilled inches of a sweater he'd managed and Bucky hadn’t said anything about him not trying again.

They were lulled into a false sense of security; when the turbulence really began battering at the bottom of the plane, it scared even Steve with how suddenly and roughly it came on. The seatbelt signed dinged immediately. Steve had to admit the turbulence was excessive. He butted his hand up against Bucky's where he had a white-knuckled grip on the armrest between them.

'You'll break it,' Steve said, knowing the aluminum and plastic wouldn't support the force of Bucky's terror. 'Take this,' he told Bucky, offering his prosthetic instead. Bucky balled his other hand into a fist, letting go of the armrest which had miraculously not yet dented. ''S OK,' he promised; 'it's gonna be just fine.'

Bucky clearly didn't agree that things might be fine; he grabbed Steve's hand immediately, without concern to their public surroundings, desperate and clinging. His knitting was forgotten in his lap; the bumps dropped two of his stitches with their force. Steve heard him practically whimper, so close to silent. He swore he could feel his heart ache like rheumatic fever in place of Bucky's fear. Steve knew it must feel like a block of ice across Bucky's windpipe, like the one the whine of the capacitors in the recalibration machine would lay across Steve's. He wished his metal hand were warm enough for Bucky to focus on it instead; it was a moot point because even his skin felt cool to Bucky. Bucky burned so bright.

'This is bad,' Bucky whispered. 'Ah, Stevie, this is bad.'

'Nope, you're gonna be fine so long as you hang onto me, all right?' Steve told him, heading off a panicked train of thought. 'You hang on; I got you.'

''Kay,' Bucky agreed.

The plane rocked, bouncing, and Bucky's other hand flew to his chest, pressing flat against his heart as tho he had to keep it from pounding right past his sternum. He gave a quiet gasp and the colour drained from his face.

'I'm so sorry; I'm sure it'll smooth out—' Steve started. Instinct made his own hand shoot out for the armrest with the next rumble. He imagined the brief moment of fear, of his stomach tightening and dropping out of him, stretching for as long as it took for ice to melt and Bucky to drown; he imagined he wouldn't like flying either.

Steve glanced at the flight attendant who had been collecting empty cups in the aisle, who had actually crouched and hunkered down against the magnitude of the turbulence; she held onto a seat arm on either side of the aisle, her blue plastic bag lay forgotten. He was glad Bucky didn't see her taking almost-emergency precautions, having turned his face away from the aisle, away from civilians who might see his fear. Steve couldn't see the horizon out the window ahead of him; even the wing had disappeared in the thick cloudy fog. A new pattern of jolts started and Bucky managed a tiny curse and started praying.

'Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee,' Bucky whispered, his hand sharp on Steve's prosthetic. His voice was barely strong enough for Steve to hear it. 'Blessed art Thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy—oh, _Christ_ —' He broke off when the rocking and dropping got worse—it somehow got worse—his voice cracking and his eyes slamming shut. The bottom of Steve's stomach dropped out as the plane surged and bounced; Bucky's grip grew somehow tighter, as impossibly tight as the turbulence was impossibly bad.

'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths,' Steve finished for him. 'Amen.' Bucky gave a little nod, his brows knitted together and his eyes still tightly shut. Steve heard him. He wracked his brain, hoping it was a good enough day that he could do this.

'Our Father, who art in Heaven,' he began, because Bucky probably said this prayer the most. When Bucky prayed with his beads, he repeated the same prayers over and over, so Steve didn't try to think of anything else, just kept whispering comfort for Bucky. It probably felt like a very long time to Bucky, but Steve barely whispered his cycle of the two prayers three times before he realized the bumps had gotten smaller and really it was no worse now than the subway under Vinegar Hill. Bucky didn't let go, but he stopped gripping with a military-grade pressure. Steve knew a prayer for safe travel too, a prayer in Hebrew; he'd never left New York 'cept across the river to Jersey before he'd gone to war, so he couldn't remember what he had needed it for. He whispered that for Bucky too, his voice loud enough for Bucky to hear him but far from loud enough for anyone else to hear over the constant hum of the engines.

Bucky’s grip loosened so much Steve could feel his shake against metal digits. His plates shifted nervously.

Bucky opened his eyes but colour didn't start to return to his face. The flight attendant had at some point disappeared from the aisle. When Bucky looked down at him, he broke Steve's God damned heart. He looked ashamed and afraid and exhausted. Steve wanted to tell him not be stupid, that he was allowed to be scared, to kiss him, to do anything to make it better, but he couldn't in public, even if the rules were different now. People might still be staring; people they didn’t know were abound. Bucky would already be feeling exposed, being afraid like that. He didn’t have long hair to duck into, like Steve did. He supposed Bucky didn’t search out assurance that his brain hadn’t been tampered with recently to calm panic. He didn’t know what Bucky could do. They were really on a plane; the turbulence really had felt like disaster.

It would be like expecting Steve to be calm in a HYDRA lab. He couldn’t do it.

If Zola’s voice rang out like the plane banked and swayed, Steve would lose his mind. Of course Bucky did too. Steve wished he could fix it. He knew fear didn’t work that way. He had been so sure he would fight HYDRA with Bucky, when he'd first come home. He thought he'd return to being himself. The longer he went without being able to stomach the idea of striking someone, even when sparring, the less he thought he'd be able to pick up a rifle and pull a trigger.

The only thing Steve could do was press his knee into Bucky's. Bucky crowded his feet into Steve's space, leaning hard back into his seat.

'It's stupid,' Bucky said, his voice pinched even as he kept it too quiet for civilians to hear. 'It's fine; ‘s just turbulence. I shouldn't —' He stopped whispering but he also didn't let go of Steve's hand. Steve stroked his thumb across Bucky's skin, mindless of his plates. He felt like he hadn't done enough, even if Bucky took his hand off his chest and began to ease his grip on Steve.

'Why—' Steve stopped. He didn’t know how to say what he needed to without it sounding harsh.

'Why?' Bucky said. 'What is it?'

'Scared isn’t weak. And the bad sleeping? Why can you apologise for being stupid but say nothing’s wrong?' Steve asked. 'It’s—' Steve stopped again. 'I can’t think,' he admitted. 'I don’t know how to say it.'

Bucky blinked at him, his face not changing a bit before he looked at the seatback in front of him. He was really thinking about it. Steve couldn’t help but hope Bucky had realised how silly it was to insist he was fine and apologise for being terrified in the same breath.

'I’m Captain America, Stevie; I’m supposed to be a superhero. I fight terrorists on a really regular basis and have for more of my life than I thought I would,’ Bucky said. ‘Do you really think it’s normal for me to be afraid of _flying_?' He looked back at Steve, derision written on every inch of his face and only some of it directed outwards.

'It’s not about normal,' Steve began. Bucky lifted his brows skeptically, looking away again.

‘Wow, didn’t know Doctor Nguyen was on this flight,’ Bucky grumbled.

‘Shut the fuck up; Melissa is smarter than you,’ Steve said. ' _It isn’t about normal_. I’m not normal and that’s OK; you think I’m OK. Normal or not, it certainly doesn’t have much to do with HYDRA.'

'I’m a grown man who’s afraid of flying,' Bucky said. 'I have a Medal of Honor and I’m scared of, what? an E-one-ninety? It’s stupid.'

'I don’t like Tony’s workroom cause it looks like a lab; it’s not even the actual thing that I’m afraid of,' Steve said. Bucky frowned at him. 'You don’t think that’s stupid. You died on a plane once and this is actually a plane.'

'That’s not a good comparison,' Bucky said.

'It’s pretty much the same thing,' Steve corrected, almost huffily. 'Flying isn’t crashing but damn if it isn’t close enough.'

'I was scared too,' Steve said, realizing Bucky might think he was alone. Bucky stayed quiet, listening, giving Steve more time than he had needed Before to get out his point. 'Not as scared but there are other things that would scare me more than you. There are things you don’t think are scary that make me stop.’

'You used to say you weren't scared of anything,' Bucky pointed out, 'like you had something to prove.'

'I _used to have_ something to prove. I had to at least _try_ to make a living, even if I never really did,' Steve corrected. 'If I didn't take myself way too seriously, no one else would even see me. Didn't work too well anyway. I would've been dead from the first sickness I got after you went to war, without someone to take care of me and get a doctor when it was time. No one would wake me up in the night when I needed to prop myself up to keep breathing.'

'You made me feel better about getting drafted,' Bucky said. 'The day after I got my card, I mean. At first—God, you froze and told me you wouldn't be alive when I got back; it was the worst thing you had ever said to me and you weren’t even—We weren’t even fighting; you were just being realistic. You were realistic that you couldn't survive even a year without someone helping out.'

'Doesn't sound like me,' Steve said. ‘To be realistic.’

'That's why you thought you needed to go to war so bad,' Bucky said.

'I was gonna die young anyway,' Steve added, remembering. 'How could I ask anyone else to risk a longer life?' Bucky nodded, looking down at his knitting. He made no move to pick it up. Steve knew his hands would be too shaky, especially for the lace shawl he was knitting for Nat.

'I'm so nauseous,' Bucky admitted. 'If it starts up again, I'm gonna vomit.'

'The worst is over,' Steve promised.

He didn't have a way to promise that. He had no power over that. He promised so fiercely that Bucky's face smoothed. Bucky’s breaths came easier. He settled, and Steve reached out to hold his hand again. Bucky let him, even with the prosthetic, with the weapon.

Everything was all right.

^^^

‘How’re you doing today?’ Bucky asked the nurse as they signed in. Jen smiled at him, and at Steve. Steve didn’t quite smile back, but he nodded.

‘I’m doing just fine, Captain,’ Jen promised. ‘I’m so glad you’re back. It’s been too long since you’ve come by to visit.’ He passed the pen to Steve for him to sign in too. ‘How’s Peggy?’

‘She’s tiring,’ Jen hedged. Bucky did not reveal the stab of sadness that shot into his chest. ‘It’s good you guys came by sooner, rather than later. I think she’ll recognise you today, Cap,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know how well she’ll react to your presence,’ she added, smiling sadly at Steve. Steve didn’t notice, absorbed in the visitor sign-in.

‘I’m kind of worried about it, to be honest.’ Bucky replied as Steve carefully wrote his surname. Bucky wondered why he had remembered how to draw, but had had to relearn to write. He printed very deliberately the letters of his name; Bucky watched him with a small smile. Like a lot of things Steve did, it seemed eager and endearing. ‘Sometimes she’d cry so hard when I came by—’

‘Peggy cried?’ Steve echoed.

‘She’s an old woman,’ Bucky pointed out. ‘She’s not herself all the time anymore. Kinda like you, actually,’ he realised. ‘Sometimes you’re not all there and nothing I can say can get thru to you. Sometimes Peggy doesn’t know where or when she is either.’

‘Well, today is a good day,’ Steve said, simple and sure. His surety warmed Bucky for a moment, terribly fond. Steve put his pen down and smiled up at Jen, polite and sincere. ‘I’m glad Peggy has someone kind looking after her.’

‘There’s more than just me,’ Jen said, brushing Steve off, ‘but go on in, boys. Thanks again for the muffins, Captain Barnes.’

‘Bucky, please,’ he said for the hundredth time. They left the reception station and made their way down the hall towards Peggy’s room.

‘You nervous?’ Bucky asked, reaching in the precariously empty hallway for Steve’s hand. They tangled their fingers together. ‘It’s been almost a century since you seen her.’

‘Were you nervous when you first saw her?’ Steve asked. ‘I mean, the first, first time.’

‘No, I’d just entered Project: Rebirth, and I was much more nervous about that,’ Bucky said. He stopped outside of Peggy’s room, pulling his hand away as a door opened back the way they had come. Steve stared at the numbers outside the door, a small frown on his face. ‘Look, if you don’t—If you’re not ready,’ Bucky tried.

‘It’s a good day,’ Steve reminded him. ‘Is she going to know me?’

‘I can’t be sure,’ Bucky admitted. ‘She doesn’t know me sometimes.’ Steve nodded, which meant he at least heard Bucky. Bucky sighed, shoving his hands into his pockets.

He hated things sometimes. He hated the way Steve kept things to himself in a different way than he used to. Steve used to hide things that made him seem weak or insignificant in the values of their day, especially next to Bucky; now, the things he hid made no sense to Bucky. Steve was relearning a lot; the things he left out were random at times, and forced back by scars in his head Bucky couldn’t begin to understand. He didn’t know if Steve were nervous. Steve had taken his hand just now, which might have meant way back when that nervous he was, but nowadays he took people’s hands all the time. When he used to lose track of things so easily, he trusted Pepper and Sam and Nat to guide him by hand. Bucky used to know what Steve thought just by his hands; he had to relearn just like Steve did.

‘It’s a good day,’ Steve repeated, as if deciding.

Steve pushed the door open, forcing Bucky to follow him quicker than he could peel the brooding expression off his face.

Sunlight filled the room more than usual, and soft radio drifting from beside the bed gave away that Peggy was awake. They rounded the corner by the door, and she looked over at the noise of the door closing behind them. Bucky watched her recognise him first, beginning to smile even as her eyes moved to Steve at his shoulder. Her smile fell, replaced by shock. Her eyes snapped between them and she immediately looked like she was about to cry.

‘Oh, my God,’ Peggy gasped, dropping the lace knitting in her hands. She clutched her chest with one hand, almost-but-not-quite reaching out with the other. ‘Oh, my God,’ she repeated. ‘ _Steve_ ,’ she gasped, reaching out. She had nearly sat up in her bed, trying to lift her shoulders from the raised mattress. ‘Bucky brought you home.’

‘He did,’ Steve agreed, even if Bucky knew it weren’t really true. ‘It’s good to see you, Peggy.’

‘Come here,’ she ordered, ‘both of you, oh, my God.’ Steve crossed the room in a second. Peggy clutched at the flak of Steve’s jacket; he held her as delicately as he would a soap bubble. ‘Is it really you?’ she asked, her voice wet, even where her face hid against Steve’s shoulder. ‘It’s been so long.’ Bucky slid his hand over Peggy’s. She moved her hand from Steve’s back and held onto Bucky more tightly than she usually could manage.

‘It's me. Bucky brought me home,’ Steve promised into her silvered hair. ‘I’m here, with you.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ Peggy breathed. She held Bucky’s hand tightly as she let go of Steve. Steve pulled a tissue from beside her bed and wiped her tears away. She swatted him away a little weakly. ‘My God, it seems unbelievable.’ She petted Steve’s overlong hair, not commenting on the length she hadn’t known during the war. Her hand cupped Steve’s face briefly, before running down his arm and along his metal wrist. Bucky wondered if she would notice the metal or take the arm as it were. ‘How long has it been?’ Steve glanced at him, but he was clearly thinking it over; Bucky waited for him to wager a guess.

‘I don’t know,’ Steve admitted after only a second, looking back to Peggy almost regretfully. ‘It’s not that good of a day.’

‘It’s been seventy years, Peg,’ Bucky told her. He sat in the chair next to her bed; Steve perched beside her hip on the mattress. Peggy’s hand felt like a thin slip of paper in his. Steve had been right about how Peggy sounded on the phone; they were running out of time with her. She looked exhausted, but the shine of lucidity in her eyes set a warm ache in Bucky’s heart, nostalgic and homesick and wistful for what hadn’t been. He could already tell he and Steve would be here until she died, even if the truth commission finished before then; they’d go back home when there was no one left in DC.

‘Why didn’t they find you sooner?’ she demanded. She sounded protective, snapping at Steve like that. Steve smiled sadly.

‘HYDRA found me first,’ Steve explained. ‘Then when he found out, Bucky brought me home.’

‘HYDRA’s been gone since the war, Steve,’ Peggy protested, looking to Bucky as if for confirmation. Bucky wondered where she was in her life. ‘How could they have had you all this time? How could you have survived them?’

‘Not all of them were gone at the end of the war, it turns out. HYDRA’s had Steve as a prisoner for a very long time,’ Bucky said simply, rather than tell Peggy her life’s work had been poisoned and rotted from the inside. He left it vague rather than explain how badly SHIELD had been corrupted, or what the price had been to stop them in DC. ‘That's why I haven't visited in a while; you remember,’ Bucky prompted. ‘I'm making sure HYDRA’s really gone.’

‘And why is this only the first time I’m seeing you?’ Peggy demanded of Steve.

‘It's only now I could come,’ Steve said. ‘They had to fix me first. I missed you, Peggy. Seeing you now, my God, how I missed you.’ Bucky felt his eyes prickle. Peggy kissed the back of his palm; she knew him too well. Steve followed her and touched Bucky’s wrist, his warm fingers brushing against Peggy’s comforting hand. Bucky wiped the pad of his thumb under his eye with his free hand.

‘It's too late for us,’ Peggy said aimlessly, watching Bucky cry. He frowned and shook his head.

‘Of course it’s not,’ he said. It wasn't too late. They had now, at least, and what could have been; he couldn’t stand anything else. His heart would break so hard his sternum would fracture and shatter and he would bleed to death right here, drown in his own blood in his own lungs. Bucky’s world had passed while he was in the ice; he had lost his place in time and his chance at what he had wanted from life before the war. Steve had lost himself and his memories, and Peggy had lost those and her place at their side. That was all right; she’d had a life and he was proud of it, but that didn’t mean that having the three of them in a room together for the first time in years didn’t make him wish with all his heart that somehow things had been different.

‘I'm old, I think,’ Peggy pointed out. She sounded terribly unimpressed with Bucky’s dramatics. Steve snickered half-a-laugh, smiling at Peggy. He’d always enjoyed a part of her humour Bucky hadn’t understood. He hadn’t realised he had missed so desperately those moments, in the dark of night or in the back of trucks on the way to the next battle or drop-off, when Steve and Peggy would giggle helplessly together. He hadn’t realised how much he missed laughing with these two people. It felt like a levee against something now; it felt like strength.

‘Well, hey,’ Steve said after a moment, shaking their hands where he held them, reaching to wipe Bucky’s eyes with the same tissue he’d used for Peggy’s tears. Bucky swatted him away with as much success as Peggy had. Steve pretended to ignore him, turning to lavish his affectionate words onto Peggy. ‘The war is over and the three of us are together. That's as close as I ever got to hoping and look, Pegs, I got it.’ Bucky recognised Steve’s words to be meant as as much of a comfort for him as for her.

‘This is all you wanted?’ Peggy repeated. She smiled at Steve, fond. She looked seventy years younger, smiling like that, with the sun in her eyes. ‘The three of us?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Steve confirmed. ‘I don’t remember much, but I remember wanting to sail into New York Harbour with both of you beside me. I wanted to watch you sign your name at Ellis Island. My folks came to America and settled in Brooklyn and gave me the best life they coulda. I guess I thought we were gonna do the same thing.’

‘I did live in Brooklyn, for a while,’ Peggy confessed. Steve’s face lit up; they’d all heard this story before, shared once ages ago over speakerphone, but neither of Bucky’s partners remembered. ‘It was an odd place, Brooklyn. Everyone knew Captain America but it took me half a year to find someone who knew James Buchanan Barnes and Steve Rogers.’ She shifted her grip on Bucky’s hand, letting him go. ‘Come close,’ she ordered Steve. ‘I've missed you.’

Steve shifted, tucking his head weightlessly onto Peggy’s shoulder, his knees bumping hers over the blankets. Bucky remembered the night he’d come to his BOQ and they’d been sleeping there like this, the bed for a roommate Captain America didn’t have shoved flush against the other frame. He remembered being horrified they’d slept in an unlocked room, beds pushed together for anyone to walk in on and question. He remembered curling up behind Peggy after barring the door. He remembered waking up between them to the sound of panic, of air raid sirens and to the distant smell of smoke.

Now, Peggy reached over Steve for Bucky’s hand as she mused about her days in their neighbourhood. He pushed his chair flush to the bed, reaching across Steve’s hips to hold Peggy’s thin, tired hand.

‘I finally found a diner you used to work in,’ she told Steve. ‘The owner said you started a fight with the other busboy every other day. He said you were a little shit and he was glad he fired you.’ Steve laughed. Bucky felt a grin break out in echo to Peggy’s at the sound.

‘That sounds about right,’ Bucky agreed. Peggy looked at him so warmly he forgot for a second he’d ever woken up in this century with frozen bones.

‘I met the baker you worked for,’ Peggy told him. ‘He and his wife adored you. They hadn’t realised you were Captain America. They hadn’t known why you hadn’t come home from the war.’

‘Why did you find all these people?’ Bucky asked her. She sighed, closing her eyes as she rested her cheek against the top of Steve’s head. ‘Why track down people who knew us?’

‘I didn’t want to be the only one who missed you, either of you,’ Peggy said simply. ‘Everyone mourned Captain America but mostly people were so happy the war was over. I wanted to know someone felt the absence of Bucky and Steve.’

‘Did you meet my parents?’ Bucky asked, after a long silence. He wasn’t that brave; this question was the natural conclusion of Peggy’s story, but he’d never asked. He knew he had nieces and nephews (he had great-nieces and -nephews, come to that), most of whom still lived in New York state, three of whom lived in the city proper with their families, but he hadn’t searched them out. It was a terrifying idea. They felt like someone else’s family; his baby sister, Eliza, couldn’t have had eight children, not when he remembered her so clearly at twelve. It seemed bizarre that Rebecca hadn’t married George Chapman, but Rudy Blumenfeld and had raised her three kids in the same synagogue Rudy and Steve had been raised in, before it burned down in the sixties. Now it was just the three of them in a room; it felt like Vita-Rays on a frayed nerve, like relief. He hadn’t realised he needed this type of closure. He didn’t think he needed them together once more, all in the same room. He thought he had already begun saying goodbye.

’Did you see my sisters?’

‘They were shattered when I gave them your letter,’ Peggy told him. HIs heart ached at the idea he’d caused them pain, that they’d mourned for him when he’d been alive in the ice, trapped and drowned and scared. ‘I lost touch with them when I left New York. I, um,’ she tried, as the threads of the sentence slipped from her hands. Steve shifted against her, garnering her attention.

‘Pegs?’ he asked.

‘We’ll have to get up soon,’ she warned Steve, close to a whisper as you used to be able to get while still letting Steve in on the conversation. ‘It’s one thing for you and Buck to sleep in the same tent on mission, but it is quite another for me to have joined you.’

‘We won’t get caught, Pegs,’ Steve promised, his voice pitched just as low and not to carry. She sighed heavily. Bucky kissed her hand.

‘I’m so tired,’ Peggy whispered. ‘Won’t do. We have nearly eighty kilometres to cross today—’

‘We’re gonna make it,’ Bucky replied. They had made it, too. He leaned his head against Steve’s back on the raised bed. Peggy’s hand was loose in his; she was falling asleep and Jen always appeared to kick them out when Peggy fell asleep. Bucky didn’t know how she knew. He stroked his fingers along the slip of her wrist, resting across Steve’s waist for Bucky to hold. He traced his eyes over transparent skin and falsely delicate-looking veins. He kept his voice quiet as he aimlessly told the story of their eighth successful munitions thievery.

He remembered that night so clearly. Successful and having freed twenty four POWs they hadn’t known would be shipped with the weapons, they’d risked a campfire in the woods. They’d huddled in the woods in the snow, a moronic group of thirty people around a small but glorious fire.

‘You wouldn’t sleep,’ Steve said, when Bucky fell silent and had lifted his head to watch Peggy doze. Her chest was paining her; he could read her breaths as easily as he could Steve’s. The surprise that used to spring up when Steve offered details from their past didn’t rise; Steve had had enough good days lately that Bucky had almost expected an interjection from him. He hummed his agreement; Steve went on.

‘The three HYDRA prisoners we captured knew the Germans or HYDRA would kill them if we repatriated them; they were supposed to crush cyanide like everyone else. With the Commandos, Peggy, the POWs, and the German boys, we were chock full of people who would sit a faithful sentry. You wouldn’t sleep, didn’t let anyone else take a shift at your post.’

‘You woke up before dawn to come join me,’ Bucky said. ‘You said—’

‘It’s the first time in history I had more sense than you,’ Steve agreed, ‘and I only slept for three hours.’ Steve looked over to him, leaving Peggy on the pillow. Bucky reached past him to push some of Peggy’s hair from her face.

‘You never said anything before,’ Bucky said. Steve blinked at him. ‘That this is all that you got around to wanting,’ Bucky explained. ‘I didn’t know that before.’ Steve kept staring at him before remembering to frown to show his confusion. Bucky realised he needed to explain. ‘I thought you—You always had such big ideas about freedom and fairness, always argued, even with Phillips.’ He shook his head, remembering the expression on Phillips’ face when a tiny medical private had started arguing with him in the command tent barely a week after the rescue. Bucky had missed their introduction at some point; he’d tried to explain who was at his elbow, and Phillips had waved him off. It had figured that Steve’s argumentative nature had preceded even his relationship to Captain America. ‘I thought you would’ve had a big thing you wanted too.’

‘I thought you knew,’ Steve said, sounding a little amazed. ‘Usually, you remember more than me.’

‘We never talked about what we’d do after the war, not really,’ Bucky said. ‘I was afraid to jinx it, get us both killed.’

‘You were the big thing I wanted,’ Steve pointed out. ‘I didn’t think I’d get to have you this long,’ Steve laughed. ‘Then I met Peggy,  and I wanted her to be a part of our big thing. How could you not be enough for me?’

‘I don't know,’ Bucky sighed. Steve looked back at Peggy. ‘She looks worse.’

‘She looks more peaceful than my ma did when she was dying,’ Steve offered. ‘That’s the best we can want now.’

‘I hate this,’ Bucky said quietly. ‘Fuck, Stevie, I hate it so much.’

‘You were never good at watching me when I was dying either,’ Steve said. Bucky scowled at him, offended. ‘You were a dedicated bedside companion, but you were always audibly worried.’ They watched Peggy sleep, perhaps too comfortable waiting by each other’s sides at a sickbed.

Bucky had wanted a lot of things for after the war, all vague and unformed. He had wanted to go home. He had wanted to see Rebecca and Eliza again, look out for them, hug them again. He had wanted to get married and have his own family he could love as much as he loved his sisters, but he had fallen for Steve and had never been as sure as Steve had that he could have had that family anyway, not even when they met Peggy and she loved them too. He had wanted Steve’s lungs to work properly. Mostly, during the war, he had wanted to keep seeing the day’s tomorrow.

When Jen knocked on the door to kick them out, Bucky felt so content that he didn’t even pull his hand out of Peggy’s. He looked at Jen, turning his head to give her a smile. She took in the scene of Peggy and Steve laying together, with Bucky carefully sitting sentry in the visitor’s chair. She smiled too.

‘I hope I see you guys again soon,’ she said as they made their way out that night.

‘Real soon,’ Steve agreed.

^^^

'Big crowd today,' Jefferson said, cooly unwrapping a mint as he waited for Steve. The slow, deliberate crinkle of the wrapped prickled as it made its way thru Steve’s ears. 'Lotsa cameras. Maybe a hat, yeah?' Steve sighed where he sat in the kitchen, beyond the shelving that lead to the foyer, tying up his boots. He didn’t like trying to hide his face from the cameras; he wanted to keep his sightlines open. Besides, today of all days it felt wrong.

'Come on, kid,' Jefferson complained, 'We don’t have all day.'

'It’s going to take all day, so we kind of do,' Steve put in, to hide how frustrated he was that it took him this long to lace his boots. He was nervous; the acute emotion still striped along the scars and the pain of it sometimes ruined his motor skills. HYDRA had never tampered with his motor skills; healing and withdrawal had ruined them. Everything was one step forward and three steps back. Bucky used to lace Steve’s boots for him when he came along with the security team to Steve’s therapy; Sam was unendingly patient and never made a fuss about how long some things could take Steve. Jefferson would watch him struggle impatiently. 'This whole thing could take months; it’s not like they’ll run out of time getting it started today.'

'All right, no sass,' Jefferson chastened. Steve looked up, frowning at Jefferson thru the shelves.

'I’m a person,' Steve told him, unsure how to say he didn’t appreciate condescension. He wasn’t normal; he knew that. He was sort of a criminal, but he had a duty to make up for what had happened, even if he’d been a victim too. He didn’t deserve to be treated like a delivery, like a mere _thing_ ; he didn’t like when Jefferson ferried him from place to place. When Sam worked, Steve didn’t mind the security so much. Sometimes everyone laughed together when Sam was working. Steve liked that. He didn’t like the proprietary hand Jefferson kept on his shoulder, almost on his neck. He didn’t like being tugged along. He didn’t even have the other two members of the security team to buffer Jefferson anymore; his restrictions had been reduced after the pardon. It was worse being alone with Jefferson in the car.

'Good for you,' Jefferson agreed dryly, finally finishing with his stupid mint.

Bucky appeared in the entry to the hall that lead to their bedroom, still tying a tie in his stocking feet but nearly ready to go, Steve knew. Bucky had been packed already last night. Steve had to go to a preliminary interview for the truth commission and Bucky had to go to Croatia. The interview wouldn't air until after Bucky came home; Steve would have sat thru six interviews by the time Bucky came home. Steve ignored the panicked whisper in his head that said HYDRA would come for him when Bucky was gone. It didn’t help that Sam had taken a few days off to go to his youngest sister’s graduation in California.

'Stevie,' Bucky called. They had a little robot who wandered the hardwood vacuuming when they were out, so Steve didn’t worry about his boots as he moved to Bucky in the hallway. 'I’m not gonna be home for a few nights; I’ll be back on Sunday. Going to Yugoslavia.'

''S Croatia now,' Steve reminded him. He reached up to straighten the knot of Bucky’s tie, tugging it into the perfect place. 'I remember; I know you’re leaving.'

'So I’ll see you when I get back?' Bucky said, casually. Steve wished he could use his grip on Bucky’s tie to kiss him goodbye; instead, he tucked it neatly against the line of Bucky’s chest. Neither of them wanted to be too intimate when Jefferson was lingering in their apartment. Steve could hear him touching the glasses and sketchbooks on the shelves. 'You’ll be all right. It’s only going to be a few days.' Bucky said it as much to check with Steve as to assure himself.

'I’ll be great,' Steve promised, even if the interviews were going to be very hard and very stressful. 'Sam will be back Thursday and Pepper will hang out with me since Tony will be with you.' Steve watched a bit of stress ebb from Bucky’s frown when he reminded him he wouldn’t really be alone.

'Yeah,' Bucky agreed. 'OK. Get going. Jefferson’s looking antsy over there.' Steve let go of Bucky’s tie. 'I’ll see you soon.'

Steve smiled as brightly as he could. Bucky wanted to reassure him, Steve could tell, but couldn’t do what he wanted with Jefferson behind them. With a friendly clap of the shoulder, and an almost-sad smile, Bucky went back down to their room to finish getting dressed. Steve went back to the door and pulled his own coat from the rack. Jefferson swung the apartment door open, waving Steve thru.

Steve went to face the world.

^^^

Bucky got back to base when the commission’s first real session would have already begun to air. It wasn’t live; he had already missed the actual session, he knew that, but missing the beginning of the delayed broadcast made him feel anxious nonetheless. He wished he had been sitting next to Steve during the commission, but even if he’d been in the country when the session started, he would have been locked out of the room like anyone else who had wanted to sit in as an observer.

He didn’t stop to strip off his battle gear; he grabbed a remote and flicked on the 1990s-style TV in the corner of the room, flipping to the right channel without sitting down. His body felt like it was vibrating; even with the exhaustion of the battle, he felt wired. He couldn’t believe Steve was on his own. The least he could do was watch in.

No one heard more HYDRA chatter than Bucky did; he knew how high the security risk was for this commission. He couldn’t blame them for their security policies, but, fuck, couldn’t someone have made an exception for Captain America? Maybe he should have been braver: outed himself as Steve’s partner, at least to the commission’s security coordinators; he knew two of them from work they’d done in Chicago, and in Houston. They were brilliant women who Bucky could trust without worry, in battle, or maybe even with this secret. Melissa was next to Steve for support, after all. Maybe they would have let a spouse sit in like they had a doctor. Steve didn’t look afraid when Bucky finally retreated to the room he’d been loaned, when he finally turned on the TV and caught the commission a few hours into the broadcast of yesterday’s session. Steve didn’t look scared; he just looked somber, which Bucky couldn’t imagine represented reality. He didn’t know how Steve could have sat there and not felt afraid. He supposed Steve had lived thru the horrors the commission would be examining; Steve had proved he could survive worse than this already.

It was a moot point. There could be no delaying the strikes in Croatia, and they would lead almost directly into the next strikes and the next. He couldn’t choose his own life over the need to end HYDRA; it would be wrong. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to watch the commission via a delayed television airing from another country while Steve was at home with Sam.

The commission members sat along a curved table, sitting around and raised above the smaller witness’s table Steve sat behind. Bucky had somehow thought Steve had to sit there alone, but Doctor Nguyen sat attentively at his side, not behind him where the committee members’ translators sat with headsets and mics. Bucky knew how comforting Melissa could be; she looked very soothing next to Steve in a lilac cardigan. It seemed less intimidating than he’d thought the interview would be, like only a conversation, crossing over the tables designed to make the committee seem big and Steve seem small.

'I fell a very long way,' Steve said, and Bucky realised where in Steve’s story the commission had gotten. He swore he could feel the wind that had whipped at him after Steve had fallen, after he’d been blasted out of the train by Bucky’s neglect, by the gunman he hadn’t disarmed properly. He’d never forgive himself for it; he hadn’t even forgiven himself enough to try to apologise to Steve for what he’d done. He’d left Steve at the bottom of that canyon; he’d let HYDRA take him back.

'I landed in a creek, on the ice, in the water. I hit rock on my way down and my arm—I don’t know if it were just too much for my serum to fix, or if it were because of the cold or shock, but it was—' The camera was stationary, it seemed, as Bucky watched the broadcast. Steve looked down and away, even if his hair didn’t curtain, stayed tucked behind his ear. He recognised the fearful tick; he knew Steve must be able to feel the phantom pain and the phantom water just like Bucky could when nightmares woke him in the night.

'My arm was hanging off of me,' Steve told them, and he tried to look up at the commission but couldn’t. 'It wouldn’t heal. I couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t heal. Usually, after Zola—changed me, things healed so quickly; I wasn’t used to being in pain that long anymore. There was so much blood and I couldn’t crawl out of the water. It was so cold my lungs were seized. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t dead. I still thought I was gonna die, bleeding in the snow and trying to breathe.'

‘We’ve seen,’ said the Chairwoman, her Portuguese smooth under the English translation feed in the broadcast, ‘that the SSR considered sending a party to recover what they write in this report as your body.’

‘I shouldn’t have survived the fall,’ Steve agreed.

‘But the American forces did not send anyone,’ the Chairwoman said.

‘No, they didn’t,’ Steve said. ‘I don’t know if they knew I’d fallen or if they were just sentries, but they found me eventually. I lost consciousness; I don’t know when,' Steve said. 'Russian soldiers, I think. They dragged me back to a little base in the mountains—it wasn’t far; they might have just been doing perimeter checks—and they cut off the wrecked part my arm and they burned it closed and they stuck me in this cell. I don’t know how long I was in there. The cell was so dark and it was cold there too. They would push food thru this panel, I guess, in the door, the wall. I don’t know. The light when they slid it open was blinding.’

‘It wasn’t big enough to stand in, or lie down, the cell; I had to sit curled up and wait for the light to hurt my eyes. I started hallucinating screaming and sounds and all sorts of things. I’m pretty sure I went crazy. I don’t know how long it was, but when they pulled me out, the light was so fucking bright. They looked like aliens, it had been so long since I’d seen anything real. I didn't understand they were people; I was so scared.’

'Jesus,' Bucky cursed.

'They hosed me down and then stuck me in this metal crate, and I was trapped in there for a long time. The box would move; I was being taken somewhere but I couldn’t understand that at the time. I thought I was back in a cell. When they took me out, they strapped me to a table in a lab and Zola was there,' Steve said.

'That must have been months—over a year later,' the Chairwoman said. 'We have no record of this time in your imprisonment, but Zola had not been brought to America until over a year after your reported death.’ Steve didn’t reply. Bucky sunk onto the edge of his bed. He wondered if Steve knew his eyes were bright with tears; he wondered if Steve knew how horrible this story was, or if he had forgotten this amount of suffering was evil in the face of everything else he’d been thru.

‘It was some time before Operation: Paperclip,’ a man along the commision table put in. ‘The scientists recruited: they went to SHIELD when the SSR was dissolved. Zola would have been in Maine.'

'He was with me, and he started wiping my memory,' Steve said. ‘It took a long time to forget that I was prisoner. Even when I forgot my name and my life, I knew—I thought someone would come for me. I thought someone would get me out.’

‘I didn’t know who I was anymore,’ Steve said. ‘I just knew someone knew who I was and they would find me. Howard—Howard Stark was recruited then. He came then, but I didn’t know him anymore. I didn’t know anyone. I was still so sure that _someone_ was coming, that something had happened to me, that I had been something—some _one_ —before. Howard helped them cut into my head and it was over. I wasn’t a person anymore and they started programming me to be the Winter Soldier.'

'And then I forgot everything, even that I wasn’t free,' Steve said. He looked up. He met the eyes of people in the commission. Bucky hoped the power of that wasn’t lost on them, on these diplomats who didn’t know Steve from Adam but had been chosen to find his justice.

'I start losing time again there,' Steve finished. 'I remember bits and pieces of my childhood, of the war, being a medic, deciding to fight after HYDRA tortured me. I guess after they tortured me the first time.’ Bucky had thought his heart couldn’t break into smaller pieces than it had; he was wrong. ‘But things are coming back. I can remember some stuff.’

‘I remember my mother. I remember her. I remember all those times I woke up knowing _something_ of who I was, some _piece_ , when I’d healed and they had to cut my brain again. I remember wondering who Howard was when they started the surgery for the implant; I remember recognising him. I remember asking him to help me. I remember the look on his face before he—I was already strapped down; he put the mask over my face and the drugs put me to sleep.’

‘I don’t remember much of doing as the Soldier; when I was working with my lawyer, after the arrest, there were so few missions I really remembered. Most of them: I remember these—snapshots, of bodies and wreckage and the sound of the gun and of the recalibration machine starting. But those first—that first—year, maybe? However long it took to build the asset: I remember every second, it seems. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I remember them taking things away but not the things they stole.'

‘It was bad but it was nothing like Azzano,’ Steve said. ‘Zola started in Azzano. All the worst things were in Azzano.'

'I watched him kill everyone with the same things he put in my blood and into my skin,' Steve blurted. 'I watched him kill them and I listened to them scream and cry and beg. I couldn’t help them; I was their medic and I had to just lie there while they screamed; I couldn't break out. And Zola—'

'He would cut us open and take things out and put things in,' Steve said, desperate. 'He would act so gentle, asking how it was, what it felt like. He used to pat my cheek and ask if I were getting stronger, if I could feel it working. It felt like dying; it felt like fear was replacing the air. I could feel my skeleton shift under my skin and I would taste blood all day long. One by one, we died in the night and our bodies would stay and stink until the doctors made a working prisoner take it away.'

'They moved all the people who had survived the first round of testing into the big lab where I’d been kept and the radiation started, and Zola gave us—it was something different; it was something new—and Davis started—he had this fit and Zola shot him in the stomach and left him to die,' Steve said, gasping, like he could see it in front of him. 'He just shot him—he just _shot_ him and left him there—'

'Hey, hey,' Melissa said, cutting in, moving her hand to pull his from his prosthetic. It would do no good to touch his back when he was like this; he wouldn’t stand the weight on his chest in his panic, too much like the tight bands of asthma. 'Where are you?' Steve looked at her; he shook his head. Bucky realised Steve didn't know. His heart broke anew.

Someone knocked. Bucky turned off the TV.

'Yeah?' he called. The door pushed open and it was Natasha, who eyed him sitting on the foot of the bed in the barrack room he'd been given for the night. The remote in his hand felt like a too-dense stone suddenly, far heavier than it had any right to be. 'Hey, Nat.'

'You’re watching the commission,’ she accused. He supposed his worry burned bright enough she’d be able to see its cause from miles away. He sighed. She sat next to him. He didn't realise until Nat laid a hand over his that he was shaking. 'Hey,' she said gently. Bucky felt his face screw up; he felt himself crying suddenly. 'Hey, fuck, it's OK.'

'I think it was worse than I thought,' Bucky managed. 'I thought—I thought I knew what hap—I thought I _understood_ —I thought—'

'Sh, sh,' Nat said, looping an arm around his back, holding him together. He let her drop her head onto his shoulder; he dropped his cheek against her hair. 'It's OK. He survived. He already made it out.'

'I'm never really gonna have him back,' Bucky said. 'I mean, I knew that and I'm not who I was before the war either, but I—I didn't know how bad it was even in Azzano, for any of them. Morita, and Falsworth, Jones, Dernier—any of 'em. I had no fucking idea what they went thru.'

'No one does,' Nat pointed out. 'Even the commission is going to be an ultimate failure. Steve can tell us what he remembers but no one will have lived it but him. It isn’t really truth; it’s all his shattered brain can piece together. Nothing will change but we'll be a little closer to knowing. That’s all.’

‘I just want to stop fighting,’ Bucky said. He didn’t know how much fight he had left in him. ‘I just want him to stop hurting.’

‘Sh, I know,’ Nat said, pulling him closer. He closed his eyes and accepted her comfort. ‘I know.’

^^^

Someone slotted a key into their door. Steve wasn’t used to the noises of their DC apartment yet, but he peered without fear to watch thru the open shelves the doorway. Only so many people had a key; it was Tony who pushed the door open. Steve liked that he kept coming and going like he owned the place even in DC, when they lived a whopping thirty two blocks from his luxury apartment. The routine of his chaos was strangely comforting. Tony only came to town a few days every fortnight, but he brought good food and wine with him every time he visited, or ferried them to his luxury apartment uptown.

'Hey, Steve,' Tony greeted breezily. ‘Bucky wanted me to drop off the—'

Steve shushed him a hair too urgently. Tony looked unsure all of a sudden. 'No, it’s OK; just—Don’t wake him up,' Steve whispered. He watched Tony relock the door behind himself; he was carrying a laptop and a heap of physical files Bucky had no doubt left in the New York office. Tony had acted like a file mule for them since Steve’s not-a-trial brought them back to DC. Tony stayed quiet as he walked around the open shelves and little hallway, placing the folders and his computer gently and silently on the coffee table before sitting in the gorgeous, dark, wooden rocking chair Bucky had clearly resanded and stained it himself before tossing a bunch of hand-knit blankets over it. Steve loved Bucky’s knitting. He’d worn thru his favourite pair of multi-coloured socks. He was waiting for Bucky to knit him a new pair.

Bucky was asleep with his chin against his chest and his arm tossed along the back of the couch behind Steve, leaning equally back into the couch and into Steve. Steve had stayed where he’d been when Bucky had first started drifting off: pressed against his side, acting as both a comforting heat exchanger and a stenographer. When Bucky had fallen asleep reading, Steve had simply waited for him to be truly under, then pulled the papers from his hands and kept working. He had known Bucky would eventually wake up with a jolt—he almost always woke up with a jolt; Steve thought it must be very hard to wake up that way so often—and would be annoyed with himself for falling asleep, taking a break, falling behind. Steve would make up the work for him while Buck slept so he could smooth the future frown away.

Bucky didn’t sleep so well anymore. Bursts of active duty and battle during HYDRA strikes were hard on him, but he wouldn’t admit it. They’d actually fought that morning about Bucky’s nightmares. Bucky had tried to brush him off by prioritizing Steve’s own recovery. Steve had gotten sore about it just like he used to get sore when he was getting sick and Bucky could tell; he’d stuck his prideful head in the sand and they’d fought. In his defense, Bucky was being just as prideful and stupid; they’d both gotten too short with each other. Working close on the couch tonight instead of at the dining room table like they usually did had felt like an olive branch; it had felt like a good apology. Bucky had felt safe enough to fall asleep, so Steve knew Bucky had forgiven him too.

'He’s out like a light, huh?' Tony guessed.

'He just went under. He’s been sleeping badly at night,' Steve said, turning a page quietly. 'So I made him a tea and gave him a blanket.'

'Pepper plays that game with me sometimes,' Tony said. 'We both get into our work, Bucky and I. It’s a good thing Bruce and Rhodey don’t live here; the four of us would never stop.'

'Are those the Portugal files?' Steve asked, leaving a note for Bucky to review page one-ninety-five of the blue-stickied packet. Steve loved Post-It notes. He liked their colours. He liked the purple ones quite a lot. He hadn’t been able to see purple until Zola had fucked with his DNA and his body; a lot of colours amused him still, still novel, all these years later. He supposed he’d lost his amazement of colour when he had been the asset. He supposed that meant it was nice to have it back.

'No, these are from Vietnam—remind him the three Laos cells are still mixed in and labeled as Vietnam even tho they’re not; the kids don’t have a new system for it,' Tony said. 'Rhodey has the Portugal files over at his place; Bucky brought them over two days ago.'

'Oh,' Steve said. He must have forgotten. Things were getting easier to remember and he forgot things less now. He wasn’t losing days at a time anymore. It was part of why Steve had known Bucky was sleeping badly; he’d realised he could remember which nights Bucky had slept soundly and which nights he hadn't. He had realised Bucky slept badly most nights.

It was a big deal to him to remember whole days without gaps. He was incredibly proud of how far he’d come, remembering so well. That was why it had stung him so badly when Bucky had treated Steve’s recovery as urgent and emergent to deflect the concern. Steve wasn’t blind in retrospect, just in the moment, in the heat; he knew he’d gotten so upset with Bucky because of his own insecurities. Insecurity was the whole reason Bucky deflected in the first place; Steve should’ve known better than to let the deflection work.

'Should I—Should I leave you two alone?' Tony asked, keeping up the half-voice. 'Let him sleep?' Steve looked up from his notes. He shook his head with a shrug.

'I’m just making notes,' Steve offered. 'But you’re welcome if you wanna stay; it’s all protocol five stuff right now—'

'I’ll play notetaker too, then; I know protocol five like the back of my hand,' Tony scoffed at a whisper, pulling one of Steve’s files towards himself. 'How you doing, man? How’s the arm?' Tony asked after his inventions like they were people; Bucky, too, asked every time Tony visited how DUM-E was doing. Steve thought about how his arm was because Tony really would like to know.

'Um, good; we’re good. My arm and I are good,' Steve said. ‘The arm, uh—' Steve stopped, because the crop of fear he used to feel around Tony didn’t pop up, just a bit of nervous energy. Steve knew he didn’t need to run or cower from Tony like he were a handler like his father; in fact, he was more inclined to stay curled up next to the love of his life.

'What’s up, buttercup?' Tony asked. His voice was soft in more ways than one.

'What’s your story, morning glory?' Steve blurted, just to prove he could rhyme too. Tony shot him a grin. 'Um, it. The plates.' Tony’s grin faded into a brief, worried glance over the rim of his reading glasses, and Steve fiddled with the staple at the top of his papers. The handlers would not have cared about the nicks made by the folding plates. The flexible and bulletproof surface allowed the servomotors beneath to function so closely to a human arm that his brain programmed the motors mostly on its own; the servomotors relied on the nerve caps in his shoulder more than the computer chips in his forearm. The handlers and doctors would never have cared that it made the asset afraid to touch or caress or hold.

'What, are the plates a problem?' Tony asked casually, perusing the loose sheets in the file he’d picked up.

‘I don’t—they’re. They fold; shift,’ Steve said. His voice didn’t sound normal, not even to him. He focused intently on his notes, and in the light noise of Bucky’s snoring, Tony didn’t say anything else. Maybe he didn’t know how to pry, or maybe he knew Steve didn’t want to really explain when asking for help with the arm was still frightening. Steve couldn't really explain, not then, but he had wanted Tony to know he should ask again sometime, when Steve wasn’t trying to hold something so much more important together for Bucky.

They worked in silence for a while, and eventually Steve reached the end of the file he had on the couch with him. He started to close up the three packets of paper, to tuck them back into Bucky’s meticulously labelled folders. He looked at Tony, comfortably lounging and working away, and looked at his sleeping Bucky too. His breathing had shifted and he had the beginnings of a furrow between his brows. His sleep would only get less restful from here.

Steve leaned forward to put the file onto the table. The movement woke Bucky immediately in a way soft, familiar voices hadn't, like Steve had known it would. Bucky gave the slightest jolt as he woke up; Steve had known that would come too. Steve soothed him after dropping the files and briefly brushed the slight curl of his dark hair back from his eyes. Bucky blinked heavily at Steve. He seemed a little disoriented; Steve hoped he’d slept deeply rather than dreamt vividly.

'Good morning, sunshine,' Tony said, when Bucky snuffled and mashed a hand against one of his sleep-laden eyes. 'How was your nap?'

'Fuck, it’s not actually morning, is it?' Bucky said, even if the skyline gave only nighttime colours.

'You were only asleep about an hour and half, Buck,' Steve said, tucking himself back against Bucky’s side as he said it. His weight was the only thing that kept Bucky from leaping up and into action.

'An _hour_ and a half—' Bucky began, annoyed with himself.

'I finished the notes on all three memos we wanted to get done; you just have to check the stickies,' Steve went on before Bucky could surge to his feet and stomp around, pissed off, with his tablet for a few hours. 'Tony’s been getting ahead on the Vietnam files. You and I are going to sleep soon; we’re not doing anything else tonight.' Bucky relaxed, a bit grudgingly, but he relaxed into the couch nonetheless; Steve smiled at the assurance that he’d taken on some of the burden for Bucky after all. Bucky’s arm fell down, pulling Steve closer. Bucky tilted his head back against the back of the couch, heaving out a sigh. He didn’t want to leave the files on the table for the morning but he would for Steve.

'How’s the new battery coming, Tony?' Bucky asked.

'Oh, it’s been pissing me off all day,' Tony said. ’Fixed the recharge rate today. Now it's great, but not blow-your-socks-off great, just, you know, great compared to when I first made solar batteries a year ago.'

‘What ended up fixing it?’ Bucky asked. Steve leaned his head into Bucky’s shoulder, watching Tony pontificate about green energy and efficient solar capture and wind and smaller, better batteries, ones that could harness energy even on overcast days, on very clear, full-moon nights. He loved the idea that the sun could power the earth if enough people like Tony tried. He thought that that world might be a lovely one, where power came from the sky and everyone had enough. That world might be possible if people like HYDRA stopped fucking it up, if people like Bucky could lay down their shields and wait in the shade instead of the shadows.

‘I should get back to work,’ Bucky said eventually, after Steve had noticed his lids had started to droop again. He wriggled, trying to urge Steve off his shoulder so they could get up. ‘We’ve got stuff to do, Stevie. Up and at ‘em.’

‘It’s late,’ Steve pointed out. ‘Very late. We should go to sleep.’

‘I was just sleeping—’ Bucky tried.

‘That looked like a nap,’ Tony offered from his slouch in the rocking chair. ‘You two have the fastest-growing hair I’ve ever seen; you should do commercials.’ Bucky sent him a glare. ‘You need a haircut.’

‘I know,’ Bucky said. ‘Shut up.’ He pushed a hand thru his hair.

Steve liked the shorter, modern style Bucky had adopted by the time the Winter Soldier had received its last mission, but he liked this too, like it used to be. Bucky didn’t use brylcreem anymore; they didn’t even have any in the bathroom cabinet. When Bucky’s hair was just long enough like this, it fell in commas across his forehead, along his natural part, and sometimes Steve would draw Bucky like that, while he baked in the kitchen in their early mornings, while he had flour dusting his forearms.

‘I think you look real nice,’ Steve said.

He lounged aggressively into Bucky. Bucky needed a break. He’d disappeared after leaving Steve and Sam at Steve’s therapy that morning. Steve had gone from therapy to that day’s commission interviews; those had lasted into the evening. Sam had dropped him off at Bucky’s DC apartment, the same one the Winter Soldier had once shot up. He’d unlocked their front door at night but had beaten Bucky home. Bucky had come home and kept working, working even as he ate the dinner Steve plied on him. It was time to rest now, surely. The day had finished; the next one had technically begun a half hour ago.

‘Thank you, Steve,’ Bucky said, sounding oddly flattered.

‘I have a bunch of dice in my jacket,’ Tony offered. ‘We could clear the coffee table and play pirate dice.’ Bucky yawned hugely, covering his mouth, excusing himself in a distorted voice. ‘Jeez, or maybe Steve is gonna have to take his old man to bed,’ Tony added.

‘I am actually quite tired,’ Bucky admitted. Steve shot him a look; Bucky was very purposefully avoiding Steve’s gaze. Steve didn’t push, but he knew Bucky had heard him out that morning. Tony cooed at him and Bucky got to bicker with someone else’s disguised concern for a change. Steve let Bucky up, let him bully Tony into their dining room for a midnight snack. Bucky’s mother used to fret over guests in the exact same way, Steve was sure he remembered that.

Bucky came back from the kitchen with a still-half-full baking dish of hamantaschen, placing it and a pile of three little plates in front of Tony. The dining room was usually sheeted with papers at this hour; the coffee table was the site of chaos today. Bucky disappeared back into the kitchen as Tony tucked in; he came back with water for Steve, and two cups of apple juice. Steve accepted the glass with murmured thanks.

‘How do you not weigh eight thousand pounds?’ Tony asked Steve, lifting another syrupy pastry from the half-empty dish. ‘Don’t you just want to be eating constantly something he’s baked? You should do nothing, ever, but baking, seriously; Bucky, you’re gifted.’

‘It’s not my recipe,’ Bucky said modestly. ‘I found it when I was looking up ideas for Purim.’ Steve reached across himself with his own hand—the apricot syrup would be tricky to get out of the plates of the metal fingers—to pull a lovely triangle of the delicately-layered phyllo dough. Bucky had made proper hamantaschen for Purim, with a bunch of other things, and Steve had been so pleasantly surprised by them. Purim had landed on a bad day; he hadn’t remembered the holiday or why the little pockets of nut and dough were familiar, but he’d felt inexplicably touched when Bucky had appeared with a pile of sweets.

‘We’re supposed to eat about ten to fifteen thousand calories a day,’ Steve told Tony, before taking a bite. The outermost dough was a bit chewier than it had been fresh yesterday, but the syrup kept the inside soft, the nut filling keeping the syrup from overpowering Steve right away. Steve could taste the rosewater from the baklava; it was perfect. ‘It’s a challenge to make enough time to cook four or five meals a day, let alone eat enough to get fat. Most days his baking is gone before sundown; I think these are too sweet to eat all of them in one sitting.’

‘No, they’re not,’ Tony corrected greedily, taking another one. Steve savoured the sweet and sticky taste on his forefinger, from the pad of his thumb. He smiled at Bucky, feeling warm in his chest and fond in his bones. Bucky caught his eyes, and he echoed Steve’s smile without seeming to realise it. ‘What is this?’

‘Baklava hamantaschen,’ Bucky replied. ‘It’s not normally made with baklava; I just wanted to try. It’s a traditional, um, pastry that people usually eat during Purim.’

‘You have to make some of these for me to bring home to Pepper,’ Tony said. ‘Can I ask you to make me some for when I go back on Friday?’

‘Yes, you can,’ Bucky promised. ‘I think you can take the rest of those with you tonight, unless Steve wants them.’

‘They’ll find a happier home with Tony,’ Steve said. ‘You don’t like hamantaschen much.’

‘Nah, they’re all right,’ Bucky agreed. Tony hummed appreciatively.

‘Can I ask you guys another question?’ Tony asked. Bucky nodded him on.

'How did you two meet?' Tony asked, pulling apart a baklava triangle to eat the filling first. 'Like, as kids, I mean?' Steve realised he didn’t know.

He hadn’t ever wondered about it even, like he’d wondered when he came back to himself how he had first met Peggy. He had sort of assumed Bucky had simply always been there; it felt like he had been. He supposed it didn’t make sense for Bucky to have been a literal constant in his life; even if they’d grown up together, there must have been a moment where two children met for the first time. He remembered many moments from his life which didn’t include Bucky, of course, but most of the memories without Bucky were with his mother, or his synagogue, or came from the circles Steve had run in that Bucky hadn’t, or from the ages Steve had spent alone after Bucky had been drafted.

'I don’t know,' Steve admitted, when Bucky eyed him questioningly. 'We were small?'

'I was seven, and you were six,' Bucky told him.

'You’re a year older than me?' Steve asked.

'I was,' Bucky said. 'It’s hard to figure now, with the ice and all. Sam would know; he’s done the math. But when we met, it was your birthday: Fourth of July, nineteen-twenty-five.' Tony lit up, glancing to Steve.

'Your birthday is Fourth of July?' Tony asked. Steve nodded. ‘Oh, my God, that’s funny. His birthday’s the same as America’s, Cap; is that why you fell for him?’

‘Nah, it was ‘cause he was a little shit who wouldn’t take injustice lying down, not ever,’ Bucky said. 'Didn't hurt that he thought the sun shone outta my ass. See, my folks had given me some pennies. They told me to go buy some holiday sparklers for my sisters and me and I was getting hassled by some bigger kids on my way home from the bodega.’

Steve remembered Rebecca and Eliza; he remembered their beautiful, dark hair. Eliza had the same big, loose curls Bucky did, but she wore them long and tumbling about her shoulders. She’d been maybe twelve when Steve had said his last goodbye to her; she hadn’t started rolling and pinning it for dances and romance just yet. Rebecca’s hair was just as dark but perfectly straight, but she used to wear it with two tall victory rolls in the front that accentuated her cheekbones, so much sharper than Bucky’s and given by their mother. With Jim Barnes’s blue eyes, she was the most beautiful woman Steve had known after Peggy; she had the same jaw and smile as Bucky, the same feminine smile, just accentuated by lipstick Bucky couldn’t wear. He wondered what Eliza had looked like when she'd grown up. He wondered what Rebecca had looked like with smile lines and crow's feet like the ones Peggy had now.

Steve missed those girls everyday. He wished they’d lived long enough to see their brother come home. He missed the parts of Bucky only his sisters had ever brought to life; he missed Bucky’s kind father and even his mother’s sharp impatience for Steve’s asthma and frailty. Their kids were still alive, all of them, but Bucky didn't talk about looking them up. Steve didn't want to push; he knew Bucky would reach out eventually.

‘They were gonna take my sparklers and my extra penny, and you were waiting for your ma to come home from the surgery on the porch, back when you and your ma still lived in the Catholic neighbourhood, in that Irish tenement Missus Currie and her husband owned; d’you remember that apartment?'

'Yeah,' Steve agreed, thinking of it. They’d had an actual window in that apartment, overlooking the courtyard behind theirs and two other tenements. They’d had a room with an iron stove they used as a kitchen and a cotton-and-rope mattress they’d shared from the time he was too big for a blanket-and-drawer. Ma had made a window box out of an old apple crate; they used to grow little things there. There had been two taps on every floor and they always poured cold water, even in the summer when it was hot and impossibly dry. He’d been born in that apartment; she’d moved there with his father right before his father had had to leave to fight in the Great War. It had been her fortitude of spirit that let her afford the apartment on her own until the Crash. They’d eventually moved out of the Catholic neighbourhood and closer to the Manhattan Bridge, a block or five shabbier than the nicer part of town Bucky’s folks moved to when his dad got that good job and his ma started to leave the working class behind.

'You heard them hasslin' me and you came off the stairs and told these two fourteen year old boys to piss off,' Bucky went on, laughing a little. Steve could imagine how unimpressive he must have been; he knew his size left him underestimated now, let alone when he was a child. 'You said they oughta treat people with respect or else, and they said, or else what? and you said, well, I guess I’d hafta fight you. And then one of 'em knocked you onto your ass with a one-handed shove.'

'D’they beat me up?' Steve asked. He figured he usually got beat up.

'No, actually,' Bucky said, letting his surprise show. 'No, he pushed you down and—I mean, I guess you don’t remember, and we don’t got any pictures of you or nothing, but you were tiny, Steve. You were so small. I think you didn’t grow so much ‘cause you had to constantly fight to stay healthy, and when you got sick, y’had to fight so hard just to stay alive some nights; you had nothing extra on your bones, nothing extra.'

'That part I remember,' Steve said. He remembered being sick before, a lot of different times and different sicknesses.

He remembered how sickness used to make him think he was gonna die. He remembered how badly his back would hurt him, healthy or sick or asleep, how sore his hips would be at the end of the day, even when he was well. He remembered sometimes messing around with Bucky and having to be content with long kisses and the pride of giving Bucky an orgasm since his shitty heart just wouldn’t cooperate and let him get hard. Sometimes Bucky couldn’t even rile him up soft; his heart wouldn’t take it and Steve would have to push Buck away because he wasn’t the romantic kind of dizzy. He remembered his head swimming and the confusion that would steal his mind and dark spots in his vision when he walked too far with his sack of papers or when the stairs got the better of him. He didn’t miss that at all, and certainly not in the way he knew Bucky sometimes missed his own preserum body.

'You had these skinny arms and legs; you were ninety percent limb, I swear. I used to think you would blow away like a tumbleweed,' Bucky mused. He shook his head at nothing in particular. 'He pushed you over with one hand and said you were too little to hit. You just leapt right back up. You told him to quit and to leave me alone or you’d fight him, and you were so insistent about it I said I’d fight him too.' Steve felt a smile break his face. Bucky grinned right back.

'When both of us tiny little shits started making fists, they decided to steal sparklers somewhere else, just knocked you on your ass again for good measure,' Bucky said. 'I pulled you up and you shook my hand.' Bucky looked unbelievably fond. ‘God, I wish you could remember that,’ Bucky admitted. It was very rare he would say something like that to Steve; he was always afraid it would lay guilt where Steve shouldn’t take it. Steve understood what he meant. He knew Bucky knew he understood.

‘And, what?’ Tony pressed, unsatisfied with the best story Steve had ever heard. ‘The rest is history, as they say? How long ‘til you guys banged?’

‘Do you fucking mind?’ Bucky snapped, his cheeks turning pink right away.

‘He kissed me in nineteen-thirty-six,’ Steve said. ‘We’d been drinking and I knew he wanted to kiss me; I wanted him to kiss me too. I sat real close and waited ‘til he put his arm over my shoulders. I looked up at him and he did the rest.’

‘You’d also been running your mouth all night,’ Bucky accused. Steve shrugged. He hadn’t remembered that night very well even at the time; they’d been drinking and Steve had been an unsurprising lightweight, a bubble weight.

‘Fine, fine, very romantic,’ Tony said. ‘But when did you two dorky choirboys do the dirty deed?’

‘What about us makes you think we’re going to tell you that?’ Steve asked him, sparing Bucky having to do it. Steve knew without looking the expression that would be on Bucky’s face at Tony’s pestering: equal parts embarrassedly irritated and fond. Bucky looked at him that way fairly often, but he’d held the look in their day for George Chapman and Rudy too. Steve liked that Bucky hadn’t been alone when Steve had been gone.

He liked that other people had seen the great man he was and tried to warm him up. He liked that Tony and Sam had taken care of Bucky when he wasn't there to do it.

^^^

‘Hey,’ Bucky said, leaning against the doorway of their apartment’s second bedroom. Steve didn’t reply, staring at the maps pinned over the desk and tacked to its already battered surface. Bucky felt proud of the maps. There were precisely fourteen red pins left to strike and turn to white pins; there were only five more weeks to be spent away striking, then only clean-up trips from then on. He couldn’t wait. With the truth commission drawing to an actual close, and with Steve long-since dismissed, Steve would be coming on the next raid. Tony had made up his medic’s uniform, and Bucky had felt unexpectedly proud seeing Steve try on the medpack harness for sizing, see him approve the mobility of his shoulders under the Kevlar.

‘I keep finding you in here,’ Bucky said, pushing off the door frame to cross closer to Steve. Steve was wringing his hand around his metal wrist, nervous and shaky. ‘You liking maps all of a sudden, or what?’ Steve still didn’t say anything, just reached out to brush the edge of the Eurasian continents pinned along the desk. ‘Hey. I’ve been finding you here a lot lately and you’re always just staring silently. It’s starting to worry me, ‘K? What’s going on, sweetheart?’

‘We missed something,’ Steve said. ‘I don’t know what it is.’

‘Well, any of the remaining fourteen cells could have an information hold we don’t know about yet,’ Bucky said. ‘I’m sure we’ll find more files; we always do. Maybe we’ll even find other cells.’ Sometimes Bucky worried the information found at each subsequent strike would never stop leading to new cells, like an unending rabbit hole of terrorism.

‘No,’ Steve said, insistently. ‘No, during all those commission sessions,’ he said, ‘there was so much I don’t remember. There’s other stuff I remember that they never found written down, so we’ve missed something.’

‘Steve, we’re gonna end HYDRA, OK; it’s gonna be over,’ Bucky promised. ‘It’s gonna be over.’

‘I can’t remember what happened,’ Steve whispered. Bucky tucked himself along Steve’s back, draping his arms around his shoulders, his chest. Steve leaned back into him. ‘Something happened, Buck. There’s something important we don’t know.’

‘Steve, every major cell has been destroyed—’

‘And all it would take is one HYDRA agent in a safehouse who knows something we don’t,’ Steve said. ‘I have to remember.’

‘You’re never gonna remember everything,’ Bucky reminded him. ‘And, yeah, I’m not gonna get every person dedicated to chaos, but we’re going to stop HYDRA. We’re going to stop them from ever having the power to hurt someone like they hurt you, to hurt people like they made you. It’ll just be pissant little schemes local governments can squash; it’ll be OK.’

‘We’re missing something,’ Steve repeated, urgently. ‘I don’t know what but we’re missing something.’

‘Come to bed,’ Bucky said after a long while. ‘I’ll take your mind off things.’ Steve sighed heavily.

‘Yeah,’ Steve agreed, running his hand along Bucky’s arm. ‘No sense in thinking about it. It’s not even painful; I just can’t remember. I don’t think it’s even in my head. They got rid of it for real.’

‘Stevie,’ Bucky sighed.

‘I know; it’s gonna be over,’ Steve agreed. ‘Maybe you’ll even find what I’m looking for.’

‘Hey,’ Bucky said, reminding him, ‘ _we_ ’ll find it. You’re coming as a medic on the last strikes.’ He felt Steve nod, felt him lift his hand from Bucky’s arm to brush it along the edge of the map again. Bucky scowled at the dozens and dozens of pins. He knew without looking at the folders of notes which bases and which cells had housed Steve’s cryounits over the years; he knew where Steve had been forced to commit atrocities and where atrocities had happened to him. He glared especially at the pins which lay in Monmouth, where Zola had had a secret lab, where he’d finished his adjustments on Steve and where they’d begun his programming. ‘You’re ending this as much as I am.’

‘Well, it’s the best I can do,’ Steve said. Bucky kissed his temple. Steve didn’t relax at all, but he didn’t pull away either. Bucky reached, tucking Steve’s hair behind his ear and kissing along his cheek.

‘It’s more than enough.’


	3. i will carry you home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _'Hey, look at me,' Barton said. Wanda felt her eyes draw up without her permission; the English was new and foreign, but she knew that tone of voice. She knew his tone. Her father had spoken like that. It was concern, she realised. That was what had been in Captain America’s voice too. It was what the Winter Soldier had shown them in the midfields of Wakanda. The Winter Soldier, a ghost, had spoken with concern and compassion and she had torn him to pieces._
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> _'It’s your fault; it’s everyone’s fault; who cares?' Barton said. 'Are you up for this? Are you?' Wanda stared. 'Look, I just need to know, 'cause there’s been an earthquake where that is definitely not supposed to happen and we’re fighting an army of robots. OK, look, the ground is shaking, we’re fighting robots, and I have a bow and arrow. None of this makes any sense.'_

'We have an enhanced in the field,' Bucky reported.

 

'Shortstop, Hawkeye’s been hit,' Nat called into the coms.

 

Steve hurried to finish cuffing the arm of one of the HYDRA goons he’d managed to keep alive to the rest of the live bodies he’d moved out of the active zone, which was getting closer and closer to the fortress. It was just like World War Two in some ways; the men—and more and more often now, women—who did HYDRA’s bidding would crunch cyanide rather than face prosecution or interrogation. This one and a heap of others had been knocked unconscious by the concussion blast of Thor hammering Bucky’s shield.

 

Steve had gone stealthily and silently in the snow from body to body, ripping out hollow teeth and collecting the cyanide crowns in one of his belt pouches. It was the oddest lifesaving; these people would be scrutinized like he had been, and it would be found that most of them had been acting of their own free will. He was saving lives by stealing their suicide teeth but no one would thank him for it, not even the people still breathing.

 

He was about to leave the goon and run to Nat’s position when she added: 'Someone wanna take care of that bunker?' Steve hesitated, and it proved to be a good move as the Hulk went smashing past him. As soon as his path was clear, he ran, between trees and slid in the snow as he dropped beside Clint. 'Thank you,' she chimed to Bruce, inappropriately polite.

 

'Iron Man, we really need to get inside,' Bucky called, the sounds of battle dim in the back of the com.

 

'I’m closing in,' Tony promised. 'Drawbridge is down, people,' he added, not even a minute later.

 

'The enhanced?' Thor asked.

 

'He’s a blur,' Bucky said. 'I don’t understand it.'

 

'Increased metabolism and improved thermal homeostasis,' Steve blurted, before he could remember why he knew that. ' _Do not engage_.' His head hurt suddenly, like a background detail the asset hadn't considered was vibrating in a dead memory, and he refused to think about the enhanced when he had to focus on Clint’s injury. He couldn’t poke at his still-healing brain and stitch someone together at the same time. The wound was too wide across for literal stitches. Steve wouldn’t be able to triage him well enough in the field. He needed to get back to the plane. The arrest procedures would have to fall to someone else; they had LEOs supporting them, but he was the only medic attached to the Avengers themselves, not the strike.

 

'Unless you can get eyes on him, do not engage the Blur,' Bucky agreed. 'It's too fast, and we have to neutralize the base before the city is destroyed. That remains our priority.' Bucky’s liaison in the Sokovian government had put the city on high alert, kept civilians off the streets and encouraged them to evacuate from any high-rise structures for community centres or the hundreds of bungalow-style schoolhouses, but there was only so much they could do without a full-scale evacuation. For all a lot of collateral damage was being prevented already, there was still a potential for more.

 

'You know, I used to carry whiskey when I did this,' Steve told Clint off-channel, peeling open his med pack. He poured iodine over his metal hand quickly, over the leather glove he wore to stop the plates from catching on things while he worked. He reached out carefully with the sterile prosthetic to examine Clint’s bloody side without gloves and without his own flesh to risk against someone else’s blood. The injury was severe, but wasn’t as bad as it easily could have been: muscle damage, no apparent damage to internal organs. The wound had the same edges as a burn, but the HYDRA blast hadn’t burned away muscle, leaving capillaries open and bleeding and nerves well able to feel their ends ripped off. Steve plucked out debris from the blast the tree nearby had taken before burying slivers in his side with the precision Howard, not Tony, had made possible. Clint forced a chuckle.

 

'Why in God’s name did you stop?' he demanded, and Steve watched as his hand went tight on Nat’s forearm: pain. Clint winced as Steve rinsed out the wound—peroxide and then saline, less than Clint needed but enough in the field. 'Fuck, Rogers, that fucking hurts.' Natasha raised her other arm, firing to cover them as Steve worked. He ripped Clint’s Kevlar further from the wound easily, yanking out a compression bandage from his pack and ripping off the backing.

 

'Hold still,' he said unnecessarily, pressing the bandage in place. The compression engaged, holding Clint’s skin closer to itself and stopping his life blood from exiting him. 'Captain, Hawkeye needs evac,' he said, touching his com. 'It’s not life threatening now, but it can be if he keeps moving.' Nat met his eyes, and for a second, the asset recognised both fear and gratitude. Steve didn’t understand, so he looked back down at his metal hand, applying extra pressure over the wound to slow the bleeding quicker than the bandage could do on its own. He had gotten used to the incredibly detailed feedback of Tony’s upgrades; they’d been calibrated back to his original sensitivity while on mission. He could not feel pressure of less than nine pounds per square inch, but could apply accurate amounts below that. He pressed two pounds across Clint’s wound, point ought four pounds more than he absolutely needed to stop bleeding, but enough extra to assure the asset of the best chance of success. Clint gasped but the asset did not apologize.

 

'Thor, give them a hand, then report back to us at the fortress,' Bucky ordered. 'Shortstop, try to fix Hawkeye up best you can in the quinjet; if he needs further evac, have JARVIS fly you out.'

 

'The enhanced—' Steve started, protesting, and Bucky cut him off.

 

'You go with the injured,' he snapped. 'We have a curfew within which to hand clean-up over to the Sokovians; you can’t help with triage beyond the field anyway. You’re done here. Thor, take Shortstop with Hawkeye; that’s an order.'

 

'No, the girl,' Steve corrected, even if they hadn’t seen a girl in the field. 'I don’t—I can’t remember, but don’t let her near you. Don’t let her. Absolutely, do not let her near the Hulk.' He gave his own wince, trying to remember why he was wary of the girl, but the place where the memory was stored was full of glass and fire. He shook his head, trying to stop it. It hurt. The asset forced its eyes open; Steve had to monitor Clint.

 

'Hey, buddy, y’OK?' Clint managed, touching his hand to Steve’s metal wrist. Steve did not feel the hand, was not even applying enough pressure to feel Clint’s wound under his palm. The asset could not reply with a dagger digging just behind his right eye, aching.

 

'Hear that, team?' Bucky said a second later. 'Either of the enhanced: do not engage.' Steve wished he could see Bucky. Bucky was clear and present in his ear, but Steve couldn’t see him and if Bucky were injured next, Steve wouldn’t be there to patch him up; he’d be in safety in the quinjet and Bucky would either fight thru it or stagger to the jet. Bucky was right; the medic went with the injured, but he also knew Bucky would be relieved that Steve was out of the line of fire.

 

'I roger Rogers,' Tony chimed.

 

'That’s not funny anymore,' Clint mumbled from beside them. A noise behind them made Steve spin, pulling a knife from Clint’s thigh, ready to take out any HYDRA thug threatening his wounded. Violence came quick sometimes. Thor stood there, and the asset lowered the weapon without apologizing. He looked down at the pressure bandage as he replaced the knife in Clint’s holster; no red had yet leaked thru the gauze; the bleeding had in fact been slowed.

 

'It was never funny,' Nat told Clint, watching Steve carefully. 'Steve, how do we move him?'

 

'Carefully, but it’s OK,' he replied, as Thor beside Nat. He guided Thor’s arms around the injury, delicate but easy once it was settled. 'Clint, hold,' he said, taking Clint’s own hand and pressing it down over the wound. It was probably unnecessary, but Steve wanted no risks on what could very well be a bumpy flight back to the jet. Clint’s other arm wrapped Thor’s shoulders. Clint winced, and tried his best with shaking hands. Thor shifted his grip, keeping one arm mostly free to spin his hammer. 'I’m going too; how do I—?'

 

'There is plenty of room for you, little one,' Thor told him, turning his back and crouching slightly. Steve slung his flesh arm over Thor’s neck, keeping his metal hand on the chain mail of his armour. He slung his knees over Thor’s hips like a child on their father’s back. 'Hold tightly,' Thor reminded him, and with a spin, they were off.

 

^^^

 

'The Hulk was not hit,' Steve guessed as they loaded back into the quinjet. Bucky was too exhausted to even shake a head. Bruce didn’t reply, moving past Bucky to the back of the plane. Bucky let him, well aware of the toll of the code green. Bucky moved over to Clint and his glassy eyes, and Steve stood from the chair he’d placed beside the jet’s stretcher. 'You did not let Bruce get hit,' he repeated, watching concernedly as Bruce hunkered down in the back.

 

'By the enhanced?' Bucky clarified. 'No, but she packs a hell of a wallop.'

 

'Did she get you?' Steve asked, reaching up to touch Bucky’s head. Bucky rubbed his thumb over the back of Steve’s nitrile-gloved hand, pulling it away. Steve let him, but his eyes didn’t lose their concerned look.

 

'I’m fine,' he promised. 'She threw me down some stairs, and she retreated unnaturally fast. Both the enhanced evaded custody.'

 

'We knew they would,' Steve said, as tho they all had. 'Clint will be fine. I called Helen Cho and she’s setting up in Doctor Banner’s lab. She’ll patch him up proper.'

 

'You’re talking over me like I’m already dead,' Clint complained. Steve patted his shoulder.

 

'You are not going to die,' Steve promised. The photo of Laura and the kids leapt into Bucky’s mind, and he shuddered at how close that family had come to being torn apart today. 'Not even close,' Steve continued, echoing Bucky’s thoughts without knowing. 'Nat will take care of you until you are fixed.' Thor let the sceptre’s crate down with a clunk.

 

'How you feeling?' Bucky asked, looking at the bandages and the IV Steve had started in Clint’s elbow.

 

'Better,' Clint promised. 'Steve’s got me hydrating, on pain meds. He’s good; I didn’t even need blood, apparently.'

 

'Good,' Bucky said. Nat appeared beside Clint, taking Steve’s chair. As always, Clint’s attention moved to his best friend and Bucky moved over to stare at the sceptre. He couldn’t believe it had finally been recovered. He couldn’t wait for it to be off his planet and out of mind for good. Even tho Steve was back, not dead and mostly sane, Loki’s words and armies still haunted Bucky’s dreams from time to time. He hated jerking awake, terrified. He hated making Steve comfort him because his nightmares woke them both; Steve had been thru enough and it had always been Bucky’s job to be the strong one. The sceptre’s recovery likely wouldn’t stop the nightmares, but Bucky hoped the conscious knowledge that it was truly gone would be enough. Steve peeled off his gloves and followed Bucky, caught in his gravity.

 

'What is it?' Steve asked, staring at the sceptre. Bucky looked down at Steve, looking unbelievably small between him and Thor. 'It glows like the HYDRA guns,' he added, poking the jewel with his metal hand. Bucky resisted the urge to pull Steve away from it, terrified. Thor watched the metal fingers carefully, but he didn’t bat Steve away.

 

'It is my brother’s sceptre, and a weapon of great power,' Thor replied, patting the lid of the open case when Steve drew his hand away. 'I am very glad to have it back; I am relieved that my search is over.'

 

'It feels good, yeah?' Tony put in, leaving the pilot’s chair to join them. 'I mean, you've been after this thing since SHIELD collapsed. Not that I haven't enjoyed our little raiding parties—'

 

'No, but this,' Thor began, staring at the weapon. Bucky felt anxious with the sceptre on the quinjet, as tho the weapon might fire randomly and somehow take them down. It was silly and unnecessary, but Steve leaned against him. Bucky looked down again, and Steve was watching him carefully. Bucky felt one corner of his mouth go up; Steve still knew him well enough to sense when he was afraid. When they were kids, out and about, Steve would have made fun, lightened the mood. In private, even now, he would bully his way under Bucky’s arms, tucking under his chin for Bucky to take comfort by pretending he was giving it. Here—now—in the jet, he pressed his wrist against Bucky’s, not quite holding his hand. It wouldn’t matter if Bucky decided to kiss him right there, in front of the entire team, but old habits of secrecy died hard; he bumped Steve’s arm before pulling away. 'This brings it to a close.'

 

'Well, we need to know what Strucker was doing with it,' Bucky pointed out, crossing his arms. 'He shouldn’t have had the enhanced. Any luck remembering what their stories are?' Bucky asked, turning to Steve.

 

'No,' Steve said simply, and Bucky knew the pain remembering caused him still, so he didn’t push. There was always the chance that Maria Hill already had the answers from the files Tony had stolen and sent on ahead, or even ones still buried in the enormous info dump Nat had put out almost two years ago. Until he knew whether the information was available elsewhere, he wouldn’t push Steve to dig into his scar-tissued memory.

 

'Banner and I'll give it the once before it goes back to Asgard,' Tony said, crossing his arms. 'I mean, if that's cool with you?' Thor gave his assent easily. 'Just a few days, until the farewell party. You're staying, right?'

 

'Yes, yes, of course,' Thor agreed, closing the case. 'A victory should be honoured with revels.'

 

'Yeah, who doesn't love revels?' Tony asked. Steve huffed almost silently at him, which Bucky knew meant he was amused, but Tony prickled. 'You’ll have fun at the party, too, small fry,' Tony told him, his tone bordering on argumentative, like it was bordering on all the time with Steve. 'What about you, Bucky boy?'

 

'This ought to be the end of the Chitauri and HYDRA, so, yeah,' Bucky agreed. 'Revels.' Steve huffed again, clearly laughing at him this time, and Bucky sighed. 'You’ve never been to a Stark party before,' Bucky pointed out. 'Don’t knock it ’til you try it.'

 

'I am not knocking anything,' Steve said, turning away from the crate. He was still a little mechanical in his speech; whether he would admit it or not, fighting and playing medic took a lot out of him and could turn the best of days into the worst of them. Bucky hated calling code reds, maybe even more than he hated code greens. Steve didn’t have nightmares, at least not like the ones Bucky had, but he would sit quietly on the balcony for hours, silent and still. He would disappear into sketches and paintings, unresponsive and too-often exposing scenes of death.

 

'Not even boots?' Tony needled, bumping his fist against Steve’s shoulder amiably. Steve blinked at him. Bucky knew full well that Steve understood most of Tony’s jokes, but liked to pretend he didn’t to annoy Tony. It wound Tony up, and he made more jokes when wound up. Steve would continue to stare, confused and silent, and Tony would try harder and harder to make him laugh. Bucky always put a stop to it before Steve could break with a giggle. Teasing Tony was maybe Bucky’s favourite thing to do in this bright, new world. Having someone to do it with had made it much, much better.

 

'Am I supposed to knock my combat boots?' Steve asked seriously, looking down at his feet. 'Against what?' Tony grumbled and Bucky laughed. He forced himself not to glance at the crate holding Loki’s sceptre. Steve checked on Clint again, and Bucky watched his friend work.

 

It was over, finally. If only he could go home now.

 

^^^

 

Bucky felt his hand tighten on the edge of his seat and he forced himself to take it easy. They had landed at the top of Avengers’ Tower almost a hundred times since Tony had set up the licensing; Bucky hadn’t yet dented anything on the plane out of unnecessary fear and he wasn’t going to start now. Steve was already standing, holding onto the loop of a flak strap. The strap was a bit of a reach for him, but he braced himself easily as he waited to roll Clint out to the waiting Korean medical team. Bucky marvelled at his life sometimes.

 

Steve was exhausted by their mission today; Bucky could read the fatigue in the less and less frequent whines of his servomotors resettling when they’d sat side by side earlier in the flight. Despite that, Steve stood, grappling a flak strap, holding onto the edge of Clint’s gurney, promising a good prognosis already. The quinjet settled down with a final bump and a jolt.

 

The moment the hatch hit the stone of the tarmac, Steve was in motion. He released the brakes of the gurney, rolling Clint out of the jet, calling out in Korean—when had Steve learned _Korean_?—briefly. Bucky watched, as he waited for his knees to stop feeling like jelly, Doctor Cho listen intently to Steve’s choppy words before rushing off.

 

‘Lab's all set up, boss,’ Hill said, waiting for Tony to vacate the pilot’s chair. Bucky stared at his boots. His stomach had settled quickly this time around. He tugged himself to his feet as Tony hauled his old bones up.

 

‘Uh, actually, he's the boss,’ Tony chirped. ‘I just pay for everything, and design everything, and make everyone look cooler.’

 

‘It’s a service, thank you,’ Bucky said brightly, clapping Tony sarcastically on the shoulder as he passed. ‘Miss Hill,’ he greeted. ‘It’s nice to see you.’

 

‘As always, Captain,’ she replied. ‘Strucker’s been remanded to NATO’s custody.’ Bucky nodded, because he had anticipated NATO would take the final high-profile collar. ‘The enhanced evaded capture.’

 

‘Do we know more about them?’ he asked. Steve fell into step beside him, and Maria fell into step on his right. She nodded, holding out a Stark tablet for him. He accepted it, careful as always, before noticing she had placed the tablet into one of the reinforced cases Tony had made for Steve and him.

 

‘Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. Twins,’ she said. He eyed footage of them at some sort of rally. He couldn’t read the Russian signs held by protesters around them. ‘Orphaned at ten when a shell collapsed their apartment building.’

 

‘Steve,’ he said simply, holding the tablet for Steve to look and translate the signs and shouting. Steve scanned his eyes over the images before replying.

 

‘No arrests without warrants,’ Steve read, pointing at a sign. ‘Lift the curfew,’ he said, pointing at another. ‘That one wants the military police to return the people they take at night,’ Steve finished. Steve didn't take the tablet, didn't try to scroll to the report visible below the footage; he was more tired than Bucky had thought. He focused on Maria. He would focus on Steve when they got home.

 

‘Sokovia's had a rough history,’ Maria agreed, talking to Steve. He hummed noncommittally; Bucky wondered how much of the turbulence in the country had been caused by the Winter Soldier’s handlers, long- and short-term. They stopped in front of the elevator. Bucky accepted the tablet back from Steve, flipping past the rally footage to skim over their file. Strucker’s scientists had written it; it was the same horrifying, cool, collected tone as Steve’s HYDRA file had been. Bucky stomach twisted uncomfortably at the idea that he had given his life to stop an organization which then just sprouted new life and tortured more children. The death toll at the Sokovian base they’d just taken down, in regards to its human guinea pigs, was nearly as high as the one at Azzano had been. ‘It's nowhere special, but it's _on the way to everywhere_ special. He's got increased metabolism and improved thermal homeostasis—’

 

Bucky stared at the text about his neurons, how fast they could fire, and what his reaction time was in thousandths of a second. Pietro Maximoff would be able to catch bullets and see a punch in a ridiculous slow-motion, even one as fast as Bucky’s. He scrolled past almost too quickly for him to read, let alone Maria. Wanda’s file was just as horrifying as her brother’s, but she hadn’t dealt, long-term, with their separation during the experiments as well as he had.

 

‘Her thing is neural electric interfacing, telekinesis, mental manipulation,’ Maria went on. Bucky dimmed her screen as he looked up at her, away from the files, with a frown. He understood enough; they were kids, signed on to someone else’s war with a message written by the extremist, radical few who could rebel against the state. They’d signed on to a SHIELD which had never existed; they’d been turned away from the species as much as he and Steve had been.

 

Hill mistook his frown for confusion. She explained: ‘He's fast and she's weird.’ Bucky gave her an amused huff. He looked up at the elevator indicators, wishing the elevator would hurry the next few stories. ‘File says they volunteered for Strucker's experiments. It's nuts,’ Maria went on.

 

‘We did the exact same thing, signing up,’ Steve pointed out quietly, while Bucky stared at the elevator lights. ‘Are you asking what kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on them to protect their country?’ She raised a brow at Steve, adjusting her grip on the Stark Pad defensively. People never responded well to a challenge to their conception of Captain America; it was hard to miss the mirror Steve drew. Bucky looked down at Steve. He hadn’t signed up to be experimented on; Zola had chosen him because he was still standing with wounds that should have killed him quickly, not slowly. Bucky wondered what Steve remembered of Azzano.

 

‘We're not at war, Shortstop,’ Hill said. Steve shrugged.

 

‘They are,’ Steve told her. ‘SHIELD saw to that.’ Hill bristled. ‘HYDRA saw to it,’ Steve added fairly, ‘and they used me to make sure these kids would never know a moment’s peace. I hope they stay off our radar.’

 

‘We won’t be looking for them,’ Bucky agreed, ignoring Hill’s surprised skepticism. ‘If they pop up in any mercenary chatter, agencies should let us know, but if the kids want to stay off our grid, we should stay off theirs.’ The elevator closed around them, and Bucky leaned against the back wall. Steve stared forward, clearly dead on his feet.

 

‘Can you manage a debrief tonight?’ Bucky asked. ‘Should I send you to bed?’ Steve considered, and then shrugged.

 

‘I can put off my debrief until I know details of Barton’s prognosis from Doctor Cho,’ Steve said. ‘I want to go home.’ Bucky didn’t point out that home was seventy years behind them. He knew Steve meant their apartment, with the big, vulnerable windows and soft bed, the shower and sinks and the couch where Steve liked to curl up.

 

‘I’ll be up in just a minute,’ he promised. ‘I’m going to—’

 

‘You should do your debrief with the rest of your team tomorrow,’ Steve corrected. ‘Nat will be with Barton; Barton will be in treatment. Bruce isn’t up for it. Tony won’t debrief if it’s only you and him; he’ll want to play a drinking game with you.’

 

‘I don’t play drinking games with Tony,’ Bucky pointed out, following Steve out the elevator onto their floor nonetheless. Nat had taken over unit three since SHIELD collapsed and she was without staff housing in New York. Where Tony had had Bucky’s shield etched into the glass of his door, he had had a white hourglass etched beside Nat’s door in place of unit three. They turned right out of the elevator, away from her door.

 

‘You would if we had alcohol which would get you drunk,’ Steve replied. ’You played with Howard before you figured out you couldn’t get drunk, I bet.’

 

Bucky almost stumbled as Steve said it, out of shock. He had played a game with Howard, in Jersey, but that was after Steve had shipped out, after Bucky had been transformed. It had been just before Bucky had followed Peggy to the front and it had been too soon for them to be able to drink without feeling the hollow absence of Doctor Erskine. Peggy had outlasted Howard by a perfectly-coiffed hair with sheer force of determination, matching him shot for shot of his fancy whiskey and taking one more to prove her point. Bucky had discovered a side effect of his new, altered metabolism; he would have had to have drunk enough whiskey to kill a hippo, he figured.

 

‘How do you figure?’ he asked. Steve didn’t reply as he wandered towards the bedroom. He didn’t stop to unlace and pull off his boots. Bucky did. He tossed his outer layer of Kevlar—ruined and torn—into the laundry baskets JARVIS had waiting for them post-mission, tucked under the credenza in the foyer.

 

Steve sat without boots, gloves, or his Kevlar vest, when Bucky made his way into the bedroom. The flak he had managed to remove sat in another basket under the desk they kept tucked in the alcove by the windows in place of a vanity or dresser. Steve had dried blood crusting over one of the Kevlar pads over his knee, but the rest of him was freer of grime than Bucky could boast. His one-sleeved underarmour shirt was likely as soaked as Bucky’s felt, tacky against his lower back. He could see a few little holes where the edge of his shoulder had caught. Bucky hated the rough scars there, along the place where the prosthetic covered and met skin. Steve closed his eyes and huffed a tired breath.

 

‘I’m going to shower,’ Bucky said. Steve didn’t reply. Bucky hoped he was just exhausted. He hoped Steve wasn’t going to fall apart. He hesitated at the door to the ensuite. ‘Hey,’ he called softly. ‘Hey,’ he repeated, when he’d crossed to the edge of the mattress but Steve hadn’t said anything or reacted to his movement. He petted Steve’s hair. Steve gave a small hum to promise Bucky at least he was present. ’Hey, you doing all right?’

 

‘Yeah,’ he whispered, leaning his head into Bucky’s hand for a moment before pulling away. Steve swiped the back of his hand over his nose, like his airways were bothering him. Bucky held back the urge to pester him about his non-rescue inhaler, even if his enhanced ears picked up only the barest of whistles. Steve’s ‘Yeah, it’s all right.’

 

‘What’s going on, doll?’ Bucky asked. He sat down next to Steve, taking the opportunity to strip his underarmour. Steve absently tracked him as he peeled out of sweaty underclothes, but he didn’t make much of a move to starting his own clean up.

 

‘I’m just tired,’ Steve said honestly. Bucky shot him a glance. ‘I used to—I used to kind of go away when I got this tired, but I’m just sitting here.’ Bucky frowned. He balled his shirt up and tossed it at the basket in the corner.

 

‘What do you mean?’ he asked Steve.

 

‘I don’t know,’ Steve said, clearly thinking it over. ‘If I’d been this tired this time last year, I wouldn’t have—I wouldn’t have really been here. I woulda lost track, woulda come back to myself when I was less tired and a bunch of hours would be missing and I wouldn’t know how I’d gotten wherever I was.’ Bucky didn’t know what to say. ‘Before, you mighta talked to me and maybe I’d even reply, but I wouldn't have known, later. Wouldn't have remembered.’

 

‘I’m just very grounded in my own head right now,’ Steve explained, looking up and meeting Bucky’s eyes. Bucky held Steve’s gaze as he tried to see if this new type of tiredness was a worry or an improvement.

 

‘It’s good,’ Bucky offered. Steve nodded, looking down.

 

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘It’s just harder. It’s harder to be yourself than to trust you’ll lose consciousness when stuff gets overwhelming.’

 

‘Are you overwhelmed?’ Bucky asked. Steve shook his head.

 

‘No,’ he promised. ‘No, I’m just tired.’

 

‘Come on; come shower,’ Bucky suggested. Steve nodded. Bucky tugged him to his feet.

 

Showering together was a luxury they had never had in their day; the water closets had always been in shared hallways in tenement buildings. They had never been secure enough to have their own bathroom. Nowadays, they lived in Tony’s ridiculous tower, and each of the three bedrooms in their apartment had a bathroom. Bucky could tug Steve to his feet and pull him into the ensuite with a shower and a bath and two whole sinks. They had a private space with running water safe enough for the two of them to be just naked together, casual and intimate, without the charge or excuse of sex. Bucky tugged Steve out of his battle gear, accepting the grabbing motions of Steve’s hands as thanks and adoration as he did.

 

It was incredibly domestic, being naked with someone unerotically. Even when Steve leaned into him in the shower, Bucky merely pulled Steve under the flow of water and rinsed him carefully. Steve was aware of it, fully cooperative and lucid and there. Steve reached up to rub soapy circles into Bucky’s shoulder blades, taking the time to press out the knots of tension caused by the exertion of the day, the fear of flying, along his neck. Bucky couldn’t help but groan appreciatively as his muscles loosened under Steve’s attention, the warmth. The hot water supply was virtually unlimited, but eventually Bucky turned off the water and pulled the shower door open.

 

Bucky gave Steve’s forehead a brief kiss once he’d tucked them into thick, lovely towels; he tried to hand Steve a set of PJs when Steve kissed him firmly. He accepted the kiss, stooping a little to rest his hands against Steve’s sides.

 

‘Wow,’ Bucky said, when Steve pulled away. ‘What’d I do to deserve that?’ he asked facetiously.

 

‘You take care of me,’ Steve said seriously. ‘You deserve the world.’

 

‘Well, I got you instead,’ Bucky replied, a little embarrassed by Steve’s frank response. ‘You’re better than all that. The world ain’t about to come in here and rub my shoulders for me.’

 

‘Yeah, you think I’m real swell,’ Steve agreed, nuzzling a little closer. Just like that, the domestic nature of their nakedness shifted to something a bit warmer. Bucky grinned; he dropped the PJs he held back into the still-open drawer. ‘You’re a little stuck on me, actually. How embarrassing for you.’

 

‘Yeah, yeah, make it out like I’m a sap, pal,’ Bucky grumbled, his hands stroking around Steve’s sides to his back. He was relieved that Steve’s skin didn’t carry scars the way his own did; he couldn’t imagine how Steve’s skin would look interrupted by evidence of HYDRA’s torture. It was enough to see the constant wear of the arm and the marks of the shrapnel that should have killed him. ‘See where that gets you.’

 

‘I think it’ll get me right where I want,’ Steve told him boldly.

 

^^^

 

‘Not such a bad night, eh?’ he asked her, because she often complained about the functions for which her firm identity as a woman made her feel obliged to dress nicely. He liked her in jersey sheath, but she’d chosen a silky-sort of dress with a full, crinoline skirt. She still looked like a dream, frankly. Bucky bet if he looked at least half-a-dozen eyes would be on her.

 

‘It’s a good party,’ Nat told him. As a deflection, she added, ‘It must be nice to see Steve doing so well.’ He followed the nod of her chin, turning his head to see Steve. He had settled on the arm of a wear-softened Le Corbusier LC3, his metal fingers casually holding a beer bottle, between three other people. Two vets from their day sat in the Le Corbusier chairs; a young woman sat on the coffee table between them, more active in the debate than Steve. Bucky looked over just in time to see Steve break his face into a grin, aimlessly reaching a hand into the middle of their boisterous conversation space to protest something, complain. It warmed his heart, seeing Steve being social with people he didn’t know terribly well. He was solidly himself at the moment. Bucky could read bits of the old Steve in his posture and his ease. It warmed his fucking heart to see it.

 

‘Nice is an understatement, Nat,’ he replied, honestly. He took a sip of the Asgardian schnapps Thor had gifted him; there was a bottle of it in the common bar and in the bar in his and Steve’s apartment. He liked being able to stop being deadly sober for a while; he’d envied the ability in the war, on days of celebration and mourning alike.

 

‘It’s a hell of a thing to see it, actually,’ he said, as the schnapps warmed his chest too. ‘It’s a blessing.’ Nat hummed her agreement, fetching another beer from below the bar. Bucky saw her eye someone behind him; without looking, he thought he knew who it was.

 

‘So, um, you and Bruce?’ Bucky challenged. She snapped her eyes to him, like she’d forgotten he was there. He liked that they were still comfortable enough with each other that that was possible.

 

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘What’s it to you, soldier?’ He shrugged.

 

‘Nothing, really,’ he replied. ‘Just making sure you’re not gonna take any of Bruce’s shit. Fella’s gotta keep an eye out for his friends.’

 

‘Oh, you’re keeping an eye out?’ Nat said, honestly laughing for a moment before she schooled her features into an aloofly curious grin. He shrugged helplessly. ‘For me?’ Bucky felt himself blushing. ‘For little, ole me?’ Natasha teased.

 

‘All right, I’ll just go fuck myself,’ Bucky complained amiably, trying to stop his grin. ‘Trying to be friendly, that’s all.’

 

‘No, it’s sweet,’ she told him, before he could even pretend to retreat. ‘It’s just funny. I mean, it’s not like you thought we had a future together; it’s not like Bruce and I do either.’

 

‘Well, why not?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I think you’re—I think the modern expression is: you’re out of his league, you know? He’s _nice_. But you’re _you_.’

 

‘Yeah, well, maybe nice is all I can get,’ Nat said.

 

‘Nah,’ Bucky told her. ‘You could get anybody.’

 

‘Not a lot of people are going to want a monster,’ she said quietly. He regretted holding his hurt so visibly near her; she took fault as heavily as he did and he should have hidden the burden better. He shouldn’t have let him take it on.

 

‘Listen,’ he tried.

 

‘It’s not you,’ she added, reading his mind. ‘It’s everything I did, and how they made me, what I went thru. Maybe I did too many bad things to deserve to even try, but I can’t have kids anymore. Probably shouldn’t have them even if I could’ve, but it means that that future can't be mine.’

 

‘Wow, you know, I’m really sorry,’ he offered. It felt inadequate. ‘I used to really want kids. It would’ve been rough to find out I couldn’t.’

 

‘Yeah,’ she sighed. ‘So I should be so lucky to get Bruce, right?’ Bucky shrugged. ‘Not a real woman anymore, after all.’

 

‘Hey,’ he protested again, again on her behalf. She scoffed at him.

 

‘What, like you didn’t want kids with Peggy?’ she asked. He shrugged again.

 

‘Of course,’ he agreed, ‘but I didn’t want her for her _ability_ to produce _—_ I mean, _Christ.’_

 

‘I can’t give anybody a real family, real love— _anything_ real because of it,’ Nat explained. ‘Love is for children. It isn’t for the Red Room’s Widows.’

 

Bucky felt a little offended despite himself. He was sure Nat, of all people, didn’t mean that barb to have faced outward when they fired it; he was sure she meant to tear herself over coals, not him, but he felt burned nonetheless. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he cursed, genuinely brassed off. She raised her brows, her elbows resting ever-so-casually on the bar. ‘How the fuck can you say that?’

 

‘It’s true,’ she challenged. ‘You cut things off between us off because we didn’t have a future if you couldn’t trust me. Imagine if you’d known there was nothing real in the cards with me from the get-go.’

 

‘Do you think the word love has such a narrow definition?’ he demanded. ‘I didn’t break things off with you because we couldn’t have the _perfect little family_ ; I broke it off because you shared my most intimate secret with a _bunch of spies_. I told you about the one about the person in my life who came before anyone else, who I got fucking killed, and I felt like you didn’t even care, that you just gave the secret away. It had nothing to do—It wouldn’t have, even if I’d known then.'

 

'Steve and I can't have kids, not naturally,' Bucky pointed out. 'I don’t even know if I want them now. You gonna suggest Steve isn't my God damn family? That he isn't my fucking _world_? That what we got is any less valuable because it’s not gonna knock somebody up? Fuck that.' He started to turn away and then turned back.

 

‘Look, you’re not any less valuable for it either, is what I’m trying to say,’ he stumbled, awkward with emotions, with something so delicate, and with the feelings he had for Nat even if she’d hurt him.

 

‘I get that it might suck,’ he added. ‘And I get why it might really hurt. But you’re still a person; you’re still incredible, and all the stuff they meant to destroy when they hurt you that doesn’t have to change anything about how you think of yourself. If it’s really about kids, you can still have kids.’

 

‘Just don’t take any shit from Bruce because you think you’re not worth something special,’ Bucky finished, feeling incredibly stupid and holding back the rant building inside of him about love being limitless. He could be such a fucking sap sometimes; he didn’t know what was wrong with him. ‘You’re something special. You seen the way Clint talks about his wife? He loves her so fucking much. You deserve someone who loves you that fucking much.’

 

‘You’re a little tipsy,’ Nat accused.

 

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘but I’m also right. You’re my friend, Natasha. You gotta—You gotta be good to my friend.’

 

‘I like you better when you’re drunk enough that all you talk about is Steve and yarn,’ she said.

 

‘You gotta find yourself somebody who rambles about you, too,’ he said, picking up his glass again. She reached out the brown neck of her own bottle. He clinked their drinks together.

 

^^^

 

The night eventually wore down.

 

Eventually, Bucky sat loosely in the corner of the lovely couch, Steve tucked against his side and his teammates the only lingering presence in the common area on R and D floor five.

 

Until Thor had brought this amazing stuff from Asgard, it had been a very long time since Bucky had been anything but sober. It had been a very long war filled with many celebrations where he sat by drinking tea as to not waste the hard-to-find liquor. Surrounded by friends and the mess of now-departed party-goers, he felt very close to happy.

 

He pressed a kiss into Steve’s hair, another against his ear, revelling in the impossibility that they were both there and alive and somehow safe and happy despite the hell they’d seen. He couldn’t believe HYDRA was gone; he couldn’t believe it really looked like they’d been wiped out.

 

'This was a great party,' Steve told him, twisting away from Bucky’s layered affection in order to look up at him. They stayed pressed together; they stayed close and safe. Bucky couldn’t believe it, especially because when they used to drink, back in their day when they were young and silly, they had to be careful not to look at each other the wrong way or too much, let alone lean into each other the way they wanted when Bucky hauled Steve’s drunk ass home at night. ‘How we ever gonna top it?’

 

'Well, we could do what Tony suggests and knock boots?' Bucky joked, kissing his ear again. Steve laughed, out loud and belly-deep.

 

'See, the tiny liar can laugh,' Tony remarked as he passed them on his own way to his seat, glass refilled with dark, expensive alcohol. Bucky chuckled to himself as he pulled his lips far from Steve, raising the little glass of Thor’s hooch instead. It was the last one he was gonna have; he wanted to disappear from this party as soon as it was gone and make out with Steve on their balcony, the lights of their city as their serenade. 'He’s winding me up, I swear.'

 

'Y’know, humour’s changed a lot since our day,' Bucky pointed out. 'Maybe we think you’re just not that funny.'

 

'Impossible,' Tony grumbled, before Rhodey smacked his arm and took his attention.

 

'What do you want to do, now that HYDRA’s gone?' Bucky asked Steve, ignoring Tony’s complaint. Steve shrugged, considering.

 

'I want to go see the Pacific Ocean,' he admitted. 'Remember when we were kids? We always said we’d make our way out there to see the ocean before I got too sick and died. I also want to go stay with Peggy; I can tell on the phone that she won’t be around much longer.' Since the commission ended, they'd been in DC whenever raids and strikes permitted. It felt strange to have stayed a few days in New York for this party rather than rush back to someone they were bound to lose.

 

'We’ll take a road trip,' Bucky agreed. 'We’ll head home to DC, stay with Pegs—'

 

'It’s a trick!' Clint shouted, drawing their attention to the conversation around the table.

 

'Oh, no, it is much more than that,' Thor promised him. Bucky thought of the myths he had read during the war, and wondered again if the power of Thor and of Loki were magic, or a God-like power, or if it genuinely were an incredible trick. He supposed it didn’t matter, because the power existed whether he understood it or not. He wasn’t sure if that were a comfort. He wondered if Steve found Thor’s existence a challenge to his faith.

 

'Whosoever be he worthy _shall haveth the power_!' Clint jeered, bright eyed and looking better than he had immediately after Cho’s treatment. Printed tissue or not, Bucky had seen easily the toll the injury had taken. Clint looked better now, certainly well enough to bitch about Thor’s hammer again. 'Whatever, man! It's a trick.'

 

'Well, please, be my guest,' Thor invited. Clint grumbled but got to his feet, rounding the table where Mjolnir sat.

 

'Do they do this often?' Steve whispered. Bucky huffed a laugh.

 

'Clint hates it,' he replied. 'He hates that fucking hammer.'

 

'How many times has it come to this?' Steve asked, as Clint failed and egged Tony on to try. Bucky hummed, considering.

 

'I will be fair but firmly cruel,' Tony said, as if he could lift the hammer and rule Asgard. What an idea.

 

'This is the third time I’ve seen Clint try for it,' Bucky said. 'Usually Thor’s scooping the hammer up at this point and gloating in his lovely prose.'

 

'I like your friends,' said Steve. Bucky jostled him lightly, squeezing his shoulders.

 

'They’re your friends, too,' Bucky pointed out. Steve shook his head slightly, not challenging Bucky on that, at least not out loud. 'Hey, they are. You’re not here because you’re my boyfriend; you’re here because you’re part of this team.' Steve made a face, tilting his head up on Bucky’s shoulder.

 

'I hate the word boyfriend,' he told Bucky. 'It’s awful. It makes it sound like we’re children.' Bucky laughed.

 

'Whatever your pretty, little heart desires, doll face,' he promised. He wanted to kiss Steve again and he was tipsy enough to not think for a moment about how in their day, he could not have even sat this close to Steve, even around friends.

 

'Let’s go, Bucky,' Tony called, drawing them back into the conversation before Bucky could lower his head. Bucky looked away from Steve’s mouth, raising his eyebrows. 'No pressure,' he added. 'Come on, Captain America.' Bucky sighed, lifting his arm off of Steve. Steve grinned, salacious, like he used to, and Bucky sarcastically cracked his knuckles in preparation.

 

He reached out and touched the hammer. It did feel powerful, strong, and magical as he wrapped his fingers around the fine, leather hilt. He knew he wouldn’t be able to lift it; he was a little afraid to try.

 

There were lots of good things about him, sure. He tried his best to protect people, would risk his life for almost anyone who needed him to, and he loved Steve as honestly as he knew how. But he had done a lot of awful things too; he had cheated and stolen and killed and killed and killed. He had led good men into battle and watched as HYDRA weapons evaporated them, not even leaving bodies to bury or tags to send home. He had been too slow to save people. He had been too weak to save people; he had been too stupid to see the mistakes he was making. He had failed Steve and let him fall.

 

He wanted to believe in justice and fairness, like Captain America was meant to, but a large part of him wanted vengeance. He wanted vengeance for the soldiers he had seen killed, for the people he had seen looking like skeletons in camps in occupied Europe, for the Japanese who were fried in their beds by his own fucking country. He wanted vengeance for Steve. He wanted vengeance from fucking something for everything that had been stripped away from him, everything Bucky had lost when he was frozen. A good man—a worthy man—didn’t want revenge; he wanted what was right and had the strength to see that thru. Bucky wasn’t that guy and he didn’t know if he could ever be.

 

He wrapped his hands around the handle, took a deep breath and pulled.

 

It budged, enough that Bucky let go in shock. Thor laughed.

 

'Nothing,' he chuckled, but Bucky could see relief on his face. Bucky gave a little bow against the sarcastic applause and took his drink back from Steve. Steve didn’t settle back against him, reaching up to brush his hand thru Bucky’s hair. They both needed haircuts. Steve seemed to like being shaggy now; Bucky didn’t know if he’d cut his hair properly ever again. He didn’t mind the long hair. He kind of liked it, actually. He liked winding his fingers thru it. He wrapped a hand around Steve’s wrist, smiling at him softly in response to the look on Steve’s face, delicate and unreadable.

 

'Widow?' Bruce offered, inviting her with a wave of his hand. She tilted her beer to her lips.

 

'Oh, no, that’s not a question I need answered,' she told him. Bucky avoided her eyes.

 

'Look, all deference to the man who _wouldn't_ be king, but it's rigged,' Tony pointed out. Clint cursed his agreement. 'The handle's imprinted, right? Like a security code. _Whosoever is carrying Thor's fingerprints_ is, I think, the literal translation?' he asked. Bucky caught Steve’s eyes and nodded slightly at the hammer. Just as slightly, Steve shook his head. Bucky understood. He shifted on the couch, pulling Steve to his side again.

 

Maybe it was his idiot, lovestruck heart, but he thought Steve was worthy. Steve had to be. He imagined Steve could scoop up the hammer and turn down the throne, just like Thor. Steve had always been a better man than Bucky, and if Bucky could budge it, Steve would be able to throw it. He understood why Steve wouldn’t want to even try. He understood too well, and it hurt his heart to imagine Steve having the same doubts about his worth that Bucky had about his own.

 

'Yes, well, that's, uh, that's a very, very interesting theory,' Thor offered, standing in the long blazer that looked too much like his cape for Bucky to take him seriously. 'I have a simpler one,' he said, grabbing the handle. The hammer lifted with ease, humming like it had come home. Thor tossed it lightly. 'You are all not worthy.'

 

'Boo!' Clint hissed, perhaps a little drunker than Bucky should have let a recovering soldier get. He was about to call it a night for everyone, force feed some water into Clint before dumping him in Natasha’s spare room, when the air was rent with a shattering screech. Everyone flinched. Clint yanked his aids out by instinct and Steve clapped a hand to the implant in his head with a gasp.

 

'Worthy,’ a mechanical voice taunted. Bucky stood, turning. A broken, leaking suit stumbled out from the Iron Legion assembly. Bucky glanced back at Steve, who was still clutching his head. The sound had stopped, but Bucky knew the jolt of pain had confused Steve, reminded him of reconditioning. He stepped to the side slowly, standing in front of Steve. 'No,' the suit mused. 'How could you be worthy? You're all killers.'

 

'Tony,' Bucky said quietly. He glanced over and Tony was tapping his phone urgently.

 

'JARVIS,' Tony murmured, to no response. JARVIS always responded; where was he?

 

'I’m sorry; I was asleep,' the Legion suit continued. 'Or I was a dream?'

 

'Reboot, Legionnaire,' Tony said, disturbed. 'We got a buggy suit.'

 

'There was a terrible noise and I was tangled in—in strings,' the suit told them, gesturing wildly. 'I had to kill the other guy. He was a good guy.'

 

'You killed someone?' Bucky echoed, wishing to God he had his shield.

 

'Wouldn’t have been my first call,' the suit admitted. 'But, down in the real world, we're faced with ugly choices.'

 

'Who sent you?' Thor demanded.

 

'I see a suit of armour around the world,' the suit told them, a recording of Tony’s voice. Bucky snapped his head to stare at his friend.

 

'Ultron!' Bruce said, sounding like a realization. Bucky stared at Doctor Banner too, shocked as hell that the two men he trusted most in this century both knew something he didn’t about the murderous suit in front of them.

 

'In the flesh,' Ultron agreed. 'Or, no, not yet. Not this chrysalis. But I'm ready. I'm on a mission.'

 

'What mission?' Natasha asked. Bucky was too shocked to speak. JARVIS was not responding; Tony had a secret project which was now spinning in the living room, having murdered someone. Bucky didn’t know who else would be in the building. He didn’t know who was dead. He didn’t know whose blood would turn up, maybe on Tony’s hands. The tension in the room shifted suddenly; there would be a fight. Steve hadn’t moved. Bucky stepped further in front of him, ready.

 

'My mission?' Ultron asked, almost jeering. 'Peace in our time.'

 

^^^

 

'I can’t _believe_ you did this,' Bucky went on, fuming as he leant against the corner of a lab table. Tony didn’t even glare, clicking thru the computers like Bruce. 'Honestly, Tony, we spent so much time avoiding SHIELD because they had secrets projects and secret missions and fucking _liars_ and now here we are, in the exact same spot with you.'

 

'Bucky,' Steve murmured from where he sat in a chair beside Bucky, elbows on his knees.

 

He didn’t remember Bucky being angry like this before. Bucky had let most things roll off of him like water on a feathered back, but now, sometimes, he shook with rage. Steve remembered being angry like that, but not Bucky, certainly not before he went to war that first time. It hadn’t been a happy way to live; he hadn’t known any other way, and he still didn’t, not really. He didn’t know why his temper hadn’t come back with the rest of him, and maybe it was still on its way.

 

Seeing Bucky like this worried him, but he didn’t know what he could do to fix it. Bucky would get angry before, sure, but usually at Steve when they fought about idiotic things, mostly anger springing out of fear that they would lose everything by trying to hold onto each other. This rage Bucky had now was uncontrollable; it burned hot enough to scald Steve and scare him. Steve wished he could return home, take Bucky back in time to all the things and people they missed, make this anger and his hurt go away. 'Breathe,' he added, when Bucky glared down at him.

 

'No, Steve,' Bucky snapped. 'No, this was an insane thing to do,' he told Tony. 'You tried to build a sentient programme. You tried to build something that could _think_ for itself and you forgot to consider the fact that things that think for themselves can follow their own paths to create destruction.'

 

'Ultron has taken everything,' Bruce reported. 'All our work: it’s gone. He used the Internet as an escape hatch. No telling where or how far he’ll go.'

 

'Ultron,' Steve scoffed. He didn’t understand the future. He didn’t understand why programmes had names. When he had been the asset, when he had run as a programme, he had never had a name. A name was an identity and an identity gave independence. Independence was what HYDRA had been so afraid of, in him and in the world. The Insight carriers would have made the Winter Soldier redundant, would have allowed evil men to control everything, protect themselves from threats against them in the exact same way Tony had tried here. Steve was sure everyone in this room, including him, would be dead if Bucky hadn’t stopped Insight. He felt like things were happening over again but this time Steve was on the outside of the programme and powerless to strip it down.

 

'I don't understand,' Helen Cho said, shaking her head.

 

Steve looked over at her, at the bruise on her arm from where he had pulled her out of the way of a Legion suit. He had been so terrified by the faint, sharp electricity that had shot thru his head when the screech made his hearing implant short out for a moment. He had been terrified, viscerally, like he was the asset again and the programming he had fought so hard to tear down would return and wipe him away. He hadn’t felt electricity in his brain since before he entered deprogramming; it had shocked him in more ways than one.

 

Helen Cho had screamed, and her cry had forced him to action. He’d protected her, practically thrown her to cover, disabled the suit that came after her. She had thanked him when it was all over, a little shaky and bravely pretending she wasn’t crying from the adrenaline, but he had bruised her, holding too tight with his metal hand as he pulled her to safety. He stared at the bruise and wondered what else would go wrong while the Avengers tried to protect the world from this. He wondered who else would get hurt.

 

'You built this program,' she said, accusingly. 'Why is it trying to kill us?'

 

Tony laughed, almost hysterical. Steve looked away from the bruise, up at Bucky. He was raging, Steve could tell from his face. He had his arms crossed, hiding shaky hands, no doubt. He was probably to angry to even talk, which had never, ever happened when they were young; Steve didn’t remember but he knew. Steve had always been the one with the temper and Bucky had always been the one to calm him down. Steve didn’t know how to do the same. He didn’t know how to play that role.

 

'You think this is funny?' Thor demanded. 'Loki’s sceptre is gone and the danger it represents is once more a scourge on this realm. We’ll have to retrieve it all over again.'

 

'No,' Tony giggled. 'It’s probably not funny, right? Is this very terrible? Is it so—? Is it so—it is. It's _so_ terrible.' He was losing it. Steve knew what losing it looked like and this was that.

 

'Tony,' he said, useless and trying to calm the room somehow. No one seemed to hear him.

 

'This could've been avoided if you hadn't played with something you don't understand,' Thor said, almost growling.

 

'No, _I'm_ sorry,' Tony said, not sounding sincere at all. 'I’m sorry. It _is_ funny. It's a _hoot_ that you don't get why we need this.'

 

'Tony, maybe this might not be the time to—' Bruce tried, as aware as Steve was of the precarious tension of the room, ready to shatter and cut everyone inside.

 

'Really?' Tony demanded, turning to his friend. 'That’s it?' Steve couldn’t believe that was the part that made Tony sound incredulous. 'You just roll over, show your belly, every time somebody snarls.'

 

'Only when I've created a murder bot,' Bruce pointed out.

 

' _We_ didn’t,' Tony snapped. 'We weren't even close. Were we close to an interface?' Bruce made a face like they might have been, and Steve stood up, cutting in.

 

'It doesn’t matter if you were close or not; it matters that you tried this in the first place,' Steve pointed out. 'It matters why. What was your goal? To control the world behind our backs? Wipe out threats before they rise? Tony, every time someone tries to win a war before it starts, innocent people die. Every time. How was building this programme—this _weapon_ —any different from Project: Insight? You were trying to take out an undone, imaginary, future threat with a giant machine that no one can stop.'

 

'Am I getting _lectured_ on gun control by HYDRA’s favourite weapon?' Tony demanded, stabbing unfairly with his words. He asked like the idea was incomprehensible. Steve refused to cow. The stains of his programming demanded he did, especially for Tony, who looked so much like one of the faces that used to hover over the asset during recalibration, during surgery, but he had always been a stubborn little shit. He wasn’t about to back down now. He stepped forward, not angry, but with something familiar grating at his bones.

 

'Yes,' Steve agreed, frank. He didn’t let Tony’s barb drive his lecture away. He wasn’t going to let Tony deflect him. 'HYDRA programmed me to be their version of Ultron. I was a cold fist around the world in place of the armour you thought would work, directing the actions of others by force. The problem was that it wasn’t the right thing to do; it isn't the right way to install peace. More than that, a sentient programme is capable of adapting, Tony. I adapted, and I brought their final solution down.'

 

 _'Final solution_ was probably a poor choice of words,' Tony cut in. Steve didn’t understand why, but he didn’t understand a lot of things about the future; he barely remembered a lot of his past. He shook his head at Tony’s glib attitude. He knew it was just a wall to hide how scared the man felt, could see it in his eyes like he had been able to see hidden worry in Howard’s at the worst of times, until they put drugs in the brain to help out the cuts and the electricity and then suddenly the programming was fully in place. He’d seen nothing until he’d stared down a target who asked him about freedom and begged him to make a choice. He’d been nothing until he’d started a target breathing on a riverbank as water burned red and black clouds spewed into the sky.

 

'What made you think Ultron would be any different than what the Winter Soldier was, what I was?' Steve asked. 'What made you think you should go behind the team’s back and create another monster?'

 

'I made him to protect us,' Tony snapped. 'Does anybody remember when I carried a nuke through a wormhole?' Steve didn’t but everyone around him rolled his eyes. Bucky turned unspeakably somber.

 

'No, it's never come up,' Rhodes said, dripping with sarcasm.

 

'Saved New York?' Tony prompted.

 

'Never heard that,' Rhodes muttered.

 

'Y’recall that?' Tony asked, peering at his friends. 'A hostile, alien army came charging through a hole in space. We're standing three hundred feet below it.’ It was unlike Tony to sound defeated.

 

‘We're the Avengers,' he added, almost begging them to remember. 'We can bust arms dealers all the live long day, but, that up there? That’s—that's the end game. How were you guys planning on beating that?

 

'Together,' Steve said simply. Tony stared at him.

 

'We’ll lose,' he pointed out, fatalistic and defeatist.

 

'Then we'll do that together, too,' Bucky said quietly but firmly, standing. He stood at Steve’s back, and Steve felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him, like Bucky and he had had each other’s back a thousand times before. Tony turned away and Steve did too, looking up at Bucky. He felt lost, suddenly, like this new world he’d been made a part of might shatter and fall apart. Bucky didn’t look angry anymore. He looked sad. 'Look,' Bucky said, avoiding Steve’s eyes as he addressed his team, 'the world is a big place and I understand that the Internet can take Ultron just about anywhere. Let’s find him before he’s ready to find us.'

 

^^^

 

Steve had tucked himself into bed by the time Bucky got out of the shower. Bucky sat on his side of the bed and sighed, leaning forward and rubbing his hands over his face. Steve reached out and touched his back. That made Bucky sigh again but he sat up, the tension in his muscles easing just slightly below Steve’s palm. He didn’t turn to Steve and he didn’t lie down.

 

'I’m sorry,' Steve whispered, unnecessary but hushed. He could be as loud as he wanted in this room; he and Bucky could have a tear-down screaming match if they wanted and no one would be able to hear them past the walls of their room in Avengers Tower.

 

'Wasn’t your fault,' Bucky said heavily. They hadn't had a screaming match yet this century; Bucky shouted but Steve didn't shout back anymore. Steve didn't even pick fights anymore, not even when he was in pain. His bad back and bad hips and bad knee and uneven shoulders pained him constantly in their day; Steve used to lash out like the wounded creature he was. Bucky used to be less of a short fuse; it was only on days he'd run out of patience that he would lose his mind at Steve for refusing help or comfort, for insisting Bucky's concern was pity when it was love.

 

'I hate getting angry like that. It wipes me out,' he admitted. He met Steve’s eyes over his shoulder and shook his head as he looked back away. 'I thought we were gonna take a break, wait with Peggy, but now we have to stop the end of the world. We have terrible luck with timing and plans, don’t we?' For all he had said he was angry in the past tense, Steve recognised too easily the lingering fury in his sweetheart.

 

'You didn’t get like this before,' Steve said. Bucky sighed once more and laid down. He lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, and Steve watched his profile carefully.

 

'No, I didn’t,' Bucky agreed, when Steve didn’t look away. He seemed unhappy to admit it, like he just wanted Steve to be quiet and stop staring. Steve wished he could remember what they were like before. He wished he knew if he had been this quiet about what was eating away at him, if the way Bucky seemed closed like the hatch of bomber was normal, or had been, for them. ' _Fuck_ , I don’t know why I get so angry now.'

 

'You’re turning into me,' Steve suggested, and Bucky looked at him, his brows furrowed.

 

'No, I’m not,' he said.

 

'Yeah, you are,' Steve corrected. 'I’ve seen you get angry since I came home, and almost every time you do, I feel this weird—I would have been furious if I were still the same.' Bucky looked back up at the ceiling and Steve couldn’t help but think he was avoiding Steve’s gaze. 'I remember you—when you went to war, you came back a sergeant and you told me you’d just been trying to do what I would have done. You always thought I was such a good man. Maybe you’re getting angry because you know I would have done.'

 

'You’re here,' Bucky said a little too insistently to hide his anxiety. 'Don’t say _I would have_ like you’re dead, or something—'

 

'You spent two years thinking I was dead,' Steve pointed out. 'You grieved for me for _two years_.’

 

‘Shut up,’ Bucky complained. ‘How can you act like—that _two years_ means anything against how long you—’ Steve ignored him.

 

‘It’s not a comparison; it’s just true, I think, Buck. You started getting angry like this when you woke up, you said,’ Steve went on. ‘That’s when I was dead to you; that means something. You missed me and you—you did what I would have done and you got angry.'

 

'I don’t know,' Bucky murmured, deflecting. He rolled onto his side—Bucky rolled towards Steve and Steve thanked God—reaching out and pushing Steve's hair from his face. Steve smiled at him.

 

'It’s probably why you didn’t join SHIELD,' Steve added, unwilling to let it lie. 'You know? You saw me as this honourable guy, this person who knew right and wrong. You forgot that I was kind of dumb, too. I’m prideful and I was idealistic; I might have stayed in the organization Peggy built because Fury would have said they were trying for peace. I would have believed them. I would have stayed because it was Peggy’s, and she was supposed to be a part of our life. I might have thought it was the right thing.'

 

'He tried to drop a _nuclear bomb_ —' Bucky began, his voice raising and his hand lifting from its affectionate position on Steve’s face. He pointed, accusing.

 

'He tried to _stop_ the bomb,' Steve interrupted. 'The World Security Council overrode his order—'

 

'And they could anytime they wanted,' Bucky snapped. 'He worked for them. It was six of one, Steve; you know that.'

 

'No, I might not have seen it,' Steve said. 'You’re getting angry again,' he accused, and Bucky rolled back onto his back, pressing his heel of his palms into his eyes.

 

'I’m _drunk_ ,' Bucky corrected.

 

'You thought I was better than I was and you internalized my temper,' Steve finished. 'I lost it; it got burned out.'

 

'I think about that all the time,' Bucky admitted. He looked over at Steve again. 'You don’t remember what you were like but—What they had to have done to you to make you a weapon like that. I know it took them nearly four years to—I can’t imagine.'

 

'I don’t have to,' Steve told him. ‘I remember. I know. Not everything, but I—I remember you. I remember me. I remember a lot.’ Bucky smiled sadly. He reached out and touched Steve’s hand.

 

‘Tony fucked up,’ Steve offered, because Bucky needed to hear it said aloud, needed his hurt validated. ‘He shouldn’t have lied to you. He shouldn’t have done this. He and Bruce fucked up.’

 

‘Yeah, they did,’ Bucky agreed. ‘Maybe I did to. Shouldn’t I have noticed something was up with Tony?’

 

‘I didn’t,’ Steve offered. ‘Rhodey didn’t say anything to me at the party, and we gossip about the two of you a lot, actually.’ Bucky gave a heavy sigh and closed his eyes.

 

‘There’s so much we should be doing right now,’ Bucky said. ‘I’m drunk and I’m sleeping and there’s a fucking crisis on, Steve.’

 

‘Don’t do that,’ Steve said. ‘Don’t think you’re not doing enough. The fact that you have physical back-ups of the Sokovian files in DC is the only reason we’ll have any idea where to start tomorrow; Tony can’t get the things Ultron erased back, not without JARVIS’s servers or his memory functioning. You’ve already done enough; you just have to wait for Maria to retrieve the physical files. She’ll bring everything back here and the kids from the office are gonna be digging thru the rest. It’s gonna be OK.’

 

‘Tony lied to me,’ Bucky whispered, his drunk eyes falling shut. ‘It’s not gonna be OK. Steve, he’s never done that before.’

 

Steve felt the moment when his tension drained and he had begun to drift into sleep.

 

‘Bucky,’ he whispered, curving his body along the side of Buck’s chest. Bucky hummed and pulled Steve in by habit and instinct. He smelled enough like battle to smell nostalgic and enough like home to ease Steve into the warmth of sleep.

 

‘What is it?’ Bucky murmured, barely awake.

 

‘Nothing,’ Steve replied. ‘That was enough.’ Bucky huffed, sleepy, and shifted further into Steve’s space. He pressed his face into Bucky’s shoulder, into his soft, crumpled pyjamas, and slept.

 

^^^

 

Steve hated waiting for the fight to be over. He was given to understand that waiting out the fight had never been his strong suit, and if the prickle of irritation and impatience under his skin were any indication, Bucky had been right when he had told Steve that. Steve wanted to be out there, breaking down evil and making sure his friends made it out alive. During the war, he’d been a field medic, always on the move; when he’d been stuck on base, he’d been in surgery, holding men down as doctors dug things out of their sheared muscle, stitching them up just as well as the nurses did. He’d been good as a medic; he’d saved lives and kept busy.

 

There wasn’t anything he could do from inside the quinjet, and waiting on call with Bruce always made him antsy. Bruce was patient and kind. He spoke plainly and it unnerved Steve. He felt at ease around Bucky because he knew Bucky, but he hadn’t finished relearning how to be around strangers without the lingering compulsions of programming telling him they were handlers. Bruce wasn’t a real stranger; he was a member of the team, but Steve didn’t know him, not like he knew Bucky, or even like he knew Natasha and Tony.

 

'You all right?' Bruce asked. Steve stopped his hand from twisting about his wrist. He pulled his hands apart. He looked over at Bruce and shook his head.

 

'No,' Steve said frankly. 'I don’t like waiting.'

 

'Be thankful we’re not out there,' Bruce offered. 'I get called out; it’s because something awful’s about to go down. You get called out; it’s because someone’s been hit.'

 

'I know,' Steve said. Knowing the best circumstance was one when the medic wasn’t needed didn’t make impatience burn less brightly.

 

'Who knows what Ultron is going to do next,' Bruce said.

 

'I know,' Steve repeated.

 

'The only clue he’s given is that he wants us dead,' Bruce pointed out. 'He might be a programme, but he doesn’t take orders like yours did.'

 

'He didn’t say dead,' Steve corrected. 'He said extinct. The whole world is his target, whether he knows it or not. He’ll destroy everything if the team can’t stop him.'

 

'You think?' Bruce asked.

 

'I know,' Steve repeated. 'Howard worked for HYDRA because he was so afraid of war that he incited it to bring a long-lasting peace. It didn’t matter that the peace was artificial. He was afraid and he either didn’t know or didn’t care about the cost. Do you think Tony is different?'

 

'Well, I didn’t know Howard,' Bruce hedged. Steve sighed. After everything the man had done, Steve wasn’t sure he’d really known him either.

 

It couldn’t make sense that Howard had done what he had to Steve—not that he’d done it at all, but that he’d done it to _Steve_ , to his _friend—_ if he were who Steve remembered he was. People were capable of anything, sure, but Howard had loved him. Howard had loved Bucky. They’d loved him too, even if sometimes his sense of humour made Bucky annoyed enough to stew over his cards silently. Howard had risked life and reputation for them during the war. It didn’t make sense that he could have been turned onto HYDRA so shortly after they died. Steve didn’t remember everything. He was still missing time, all thruout his life before. He remembered more things everyday now, and he forgot less and less. He remembered almost everything that happened day-to-day now; it was clear. He liked having memories.

 

'Fear does not suit the Starks,' Steve said. 'Fear drives them to do bad things to the people they love. Howard hurt me; Tony lied to Bucky.' Bruce shot him a look, surprised that the two were comparable. 'You shouldn’t lie to Bucky,' Steve explained. 'He deserves better.' Bruce looked away, and Steve looked at the floor. He hated waiting.

 

'Why did you help Tony?' Steve asked, suddenly. 'Why did you help him build Ultron?' Bruce looked away, considering.

 

'I’m a scientist,' he replied. 'We get curious when we get presented with a possible impossibility. I guess I wanted to see if we could.'

 

'That’s a pretty shit reason to lie to Buck,' Steve pointed out. Bruce sighed.

 

'I didn’t _lie_ to Bucky—' Bruce tried.

 

'You said you were giving the sceptre a once-over; you _didn’t_ say you were going to download its interface and manipulate it to suit your own purposes,' Steve interrupted. 'That’s a damn lie if I’ve ever heard one.'

 

'I regret it,' Bruce offered. Steve scoffed.

 

'Yeah, well, if curiosity is all it takes for you to make a mistake this big, I’m sure it’ll happen again,' he said. 'Cats have nine lives because they don’t learn lessons about when not to be curious.’

 

The coms crackled before Bruce could reply or rebuff him, drawing their attention. Steve’s heart sped up. He wished he could punch into the conversation, demand a team check-in for the majority purpose of making sure Bucky was all right. Bruce beat him to it.

 

'Guys? Is this a code green?' Bruce asked, pressing into the coms running thru the quinjet. 'Or a code red?' he added, glancing at Steve. The reply was garbled, and Bruce looked over to where Steve sat, elbows on knees. Steve tilted his head, unsure. Bruce rubbed his hand nervously and opened the back hatch. Steve stood too, looking out over the salvage yard. Something about this place scared him, but he had never been here before, at least, not that he remembered. It didn’t feel even a little familiar, not like Strucker’s base had. He’d remembered that base well enough to tell Tony about the secret door; he remembered in the vaguest way waking up— _the viscous, tacky water of the cryochamber draining around the asset as it struggled to maintain its footing on shaky and frozen limbs—_ and walking thru that secret door with fresh programming in his head and— _the rumble of the truck that took the asset to the target; the look of the passing strips of streetlight across barrels of the guards’ guns as they sped down rural highways—_ a political target from Russia stopping in the nearby Sokovian capital on their way to the fractured Berlin. The target had been confirmed dead in three hours and forty one minutes. The asset had been back on ice in eight.

 

Bruce made to step out of the jet, and Steve grabbed his sleeve with his metal hand. Bruce stopped; he listened always to small cues Steve gave when big ones were beyond his burgeoning autonomy. Steve thought it was because he kept himself on such a tight leash he could recognise the one Steve had been tethered to, even if Bruce held his own where Steve’s leash had seen him dragged around the globe killing for decades.

 

'What is it?' Bruce asked, ever patient with Steve, even in times of crisis. Steve shook his head. 'It sounded like a code green,' he prompted, shaking his arm lightly. Steve shook his head again, looking across at the two people just outside the HMS Churchill. He could make out bleached blond and long brown hair; the Maximoffs were either hunkered down or arming up. Bruce could not risk engaging the girl. Steve knew that in his bones. He didn’t know why or where the knowledge came from; it didn’t make sense that the asset would have known, but Steve knew now.

 

'No,' he said, firmly. 'No, you stay.' He pushed at Bruce’s arm, gentle, and Bruce let him push him back into the jet. 'You stay,' Steve ordered, feeling panicked.

 

'All right,' Bruce agreed, even just to placate Steve. 'Are you going? They didn’t call for a medic—’

 

'No, but they need someone,' Steve replied. 'They can’t have the Other Guy. The Maximoffs are out there.' Bruce hesitated, moving back to the hatch switch. ‘There is a city nearby,’ Steve reminded him. ‘Which of us out of control will do more damage?’

Bruce looked away, and Steve regretted his choice of words. He didn’t mean to guilt Bruce; he knew the man felt, now, that he was hiding and letting Steve wander alone in the proverbial belly of the beast. Steve just knew he was keeping the Hulk’s beast belly far from the horror he knew the Maximoff girl could show them, could cause. If poked, if the real Hulk came out, without Bruce to keep him in line and on target, Steve knew he would tear the Wakandan capital apart; it would tear apart a city as dense and alive as New York. The Hulk would destroy too much. Steve, thrown back to his worse self, would hopefully only try to find a rendezvous, lost without a mission.

 

'Be careful,' Steve added, backing out of the jet.

 

'You’re the one headed into the line of fire,' Bruce pointed out.

 

'I was forged in ice; I can handle fire,' he said, before he could help himself. He wasn’t afraid of dying in the fight. He had been during the war, but the fall that should have killed him didn’t. What happened after he didn’t die was worse than any death or afterlife he could have imagined. He crossed the mud field and the twins stood, moving to meet him.

 

'You two can still walk away from this,' he told them as they approached. Even tho Pietro could run faster than even Steve could see, he followed his sister as she walked cautiously towards Steve

 

‘Oh, we will,’ Wanda assured him.

 

‘No, I mean you don't have to keep fighting,’ he said. ‘Ultron is a bad programme to take orders from. I know a thing or two about bad programmes, and he is one of them. I know you've suffered. I can help.’

 

 _'Are you really who they say you are?'_ Wanda asked him, her Russian smooth and easy, keeping a distance. Steve’s head tilted, not understanding who she meant. ' _You are the Winter Soldier, yes_?’ she pressed him. ‘ _You are real, not just a ghost story to make us afraid? You are the Winter Soldier, and you fight against SHIELD now_.'

 

 _'I was the Soldier, but I'm free now. You can be free too_ ,' Steve offered. Their accent labelled them Sokovian too clearly; the Soldier’s accent was perfectly neutral, could be from anyplace in Mother Russia or her strongholds. ‘ _SHIELD lied to you. You were promised peace and given fear. You have felt the fear they want to give the world. You know that they can’t give the freedom they promised, not when they are so willing to hurt people they way they have to get there_.'

 

'Stories of you make us afraid,' Pietro replied. ‘Not stories of them.’ The twins were almost circling now, like sharks in the water. Steve knew suddenly he couldn’t fight, not them. He couldn’t fight children forced into a life like this; more than that, he couldn’t fight a kid who moved so fast as to be invisible and another able to manipulate his mind and take his control again. He was equipped for a lot of things, but not this. ' _And you want us to trust you to free us_.'

 

' _They have always stood strong_ ,' Wanda pointed out. She didn’t sound particularly sure of it, even as she corrected him. ' _Revolutions, governments, they come and go, but SHIELD has always been here._ '

 

' _SHIELD was never real; it was HYDRA all along_ ,' Steve said. ' _Besides, it is falling. Strucker is the last real power they have; the world has wiped out all the little cells. Everything I can remember is gone_.’

 

‘ _Strucker is already dead_ ,’ Pietro told him.

 

 _‘Then SHIELD is already gone, and so is HYDRA_ ,’ Steve said. ‘ _Ultron is evil. He will take away your choice and you will have to fight people you can’t beat. If you come with us, you can do anything_.'

 

'Anything we want?' the boy asked, sounding unbelievably curious.

 

‘Yes,’ Steve promised. ‘Anything.’ He meant it. He would give them recourse, a reprieve somehow; they were not monsters. They had felt like their world was at war when they let a German scientist experiment on them; Bucky had done the same thing and he was the best thing in Steve’s life. The same thing had happened to Steve without choice, time and time again. These two had fought for HYDRA, but so had he. In some ways, not a one of them had had a real choice.

 

They had signed up as children, as orphans, too young to know better or have options, and Steve knew from his time as one of HYDRA’s weapons that they likely hadn’t seen much of the outside world since. He certainly hadn’t, but he had been stored in ice and time where these two had been raised in labs and in fortresses. He wasn’t sure which of them had it worse. At least these two had had each other. He hoped to God they had at least had each other.

 

' _What I want is to tear them apart. No one inspires more fear than you_ ,' the girl sneered. Her brother scooped her up, moving past Steve too quickly for him to do a thing, and slowly enough for her magic to hit him. His knees gave out as his head swam and he lost sight of the salvage yard, as he forgot he was meant to be covering Bruce. Her magic swept thru him like lightning and the last thought in his head was that system recalibration had finally started.

 

^^^

 

'How’s the team?' Maria asked Tony as Bucky sat heavily in the quinjet. He felt numb. He felt like they had lost this battle, and he was having a hard time imagining they could win this war. His head ached, like the magic the girl had thrown at him had scraped over his mind with fireplace pokers. Nat was still mostly unresponsive, even after Clint fretted over her. Bruce was with her now, blessedly unaffected, and Bucky was relieved they at least weren’t looking at dozens of deaths and millions in property damage. He imagined the Wakandans were displeased that the Avengers had plowed in without asking; they’d asked for permission from every country in which HYDRA had operated. He had set a certain precedent of respect and he had disregarded it during this emergency. It was the first country he had been to in Africa since the war, barring the planning sessions; it was an emergency and not a planned, meticulous mission, but it still ate at him. He didn’t like the way it looked or the way it felt.

 

Taking down HYDRA had taken planning and had given him months to decide what was the right thing to do. It turned out Bucky didn’t know how to operate properly when an emergency like this one arose. He couldn’t even justify this catastrophe to himself that way; this emergency had been created internally, by a member of his team. Two of his team had accelerated it, and now they’d invaded a country’s sovereignty and lost a former assassin near their largest city. His stomach felt like it was turning to liquid, sinking down and boiling from the heat of shame, scalding him.

 

'We took a hit,' Tony reported. 'We’ll shake it off.' Bucky glanced over at the screen of Maria’s face. 'Steve disappeared after he got hit. Bruce wanted to stop him, but he couldn’t risk leaving the jet with the Maximoffs in the field.'

 

'He made the right call,' Bucky added miserably, speaking loudly enough for Bruce to hear him easily where he sat, staying ever watchful of Nat where she had leaned her head into his knees. He’d wrapped her in a shock blanket and the sight sank Bucky’s heart.

 

'Shortstop is on the loose after suffering an unknown neural telepathy attack?' Maria echoed. 'Is there a chance his programming has reengaged?'

 

Bucky dropped his head between his shoulders, because that seemed to be the only explanation for why Steve took off, unless Ultron took a prize. He didn’t know why else Steve would have disappeared. They had been hit—everyone but Clint and Bruce had been hit—but none of them had run away. He had felt like he could barely move. He’d been paralyzed by his fear, and Clint had had to drag Natasha off of a set of steel steps. Bucky had been paralyzed by fear, and he’d let Steve get hit, let him vanish in the aftermath of whatever he’d seen. He’d let the entire team get hit. He had no idea how long he had stood there, hallucinating and now idea how long it had taken him to snap out of it once he’d come back to the HMS Churchill. Bucky’s vision still ached in his chest, lighting an icy fire inside his sternum and his bones; he couldn’t imagine what Steve had seen or felt when Wanda had struck him.

 

'We took a hit that shook us hard,' Tony repeated. 'Tiny Tim took one too. Try to track the com functions in the hearing implant; we don’t have a chance of finding him otherwise.'

 

'Will do, boss,' she replied. 'Until then, maybe stay away from New York. People have a lot to say and little of its good.'

 

'So, stay in stealth mode, run and hide,' Tony clarified, sounding horribly unimpressed.

 

'Until we can find Ultron, I don’t have anything else to offer,' she said. She sounded resigned. Bucky hated that, even tho he could feel the same resignation settling in his feet.

 

'Neither do we,' Tony admitted. He hung up. He stood too, rubbing the back of his neck as he surveyed the wreckage of the team. Bucky could feel Tony’s stare land on him.

 

'I’m sorry,' he said. Bucky looked up at him. 'This is my fault. I shouldn’t have—I should have done better.'

 

'She hit you in Sokovia, didn’t she, at Strucker’s base, the—the witch?' Bucky guessed. Tony cut his eyes away. 'She showed you something awful and you freaked out. Tony, if you—I get it, if you were scared. But you should’ve come to me, or any of us, not gone to a security chest of ideas. You didn’t have to be afraid and alone. We knew what she was capable of. We could have helped you if you saw something that shook you.'

 

'Frankly,' Tony put in, arms crossed against his chest, 'I don’t see why you’re not shaken. What did she show you?' Bucky didn’t reply.

 

He’d seen home, the home he had somehow thought he could have after the war.

 

He’d seen a little house in Brooklyn, a brand new radio playing music that had sounded like wartime. He’d seen Peggy, young and aware, at the table with two tiny, little, _healthy_ , blond children, waiting for the dinner he’d made to be served. They’d been the most brilliant thing Bucky had ever seen. The parts of them that were Steve: their smiles, the blond of their hair, the grace in the girl’s movements as she clamoured with her brother. He saw Peggy in them too: the shape of their little faces, their lovely, lit-up eyes, and the little boy’s nose, just like hers.

 

The butter knives had been blindingly sharp next to the forks and plates. Spilled juice looked like blood on the girl’s tiny shirt and on the tablecloth in front of her, like a massacre, like a genocide, like the one Bucky had been drafted to stop, like blood spewed from victims; the overhead fan in the kitchen whooshed and hummed like a dying helicarrier, like the broken rotors Tony had barely fixed in time. The laughter of the kids had sounded like screams suddenly, like torture and death; Bucky had been unable, _unable_ , unable to feel the warm reality of the home.

 

He’d been afraid, terrified, freezing, horrified that the spilled juice was really blood down the shirt of his daughter, like his son’s laughter was really going to warp to screaming, or that someone might cut them with the keen blades on the table. Peggy had smiled up at him, bright-eyed and lucid and _proud_ , and he hadn’t been able to smile back, even in the dream, because he knew she was going to lose everything too, and in the version of life he would have had in the dream, he would have been there to see her, slowly stripping away from herself like old paint on a broken fence. He would have watched her dissolve and die and lose herself; he would have known every bit of loss as finely as she did. An air raid siren had sheared the air; he spun, without his shield, without anything to protect the precious, miraculous, inestimable family behind him—to protect everything he had ever wanted.

 

It was just a shrilling kettle, and then they were gone, and he was alone, in an empty house without even the table, without the meal or the noise or the kids or the shelf littered with framed memories, with the only screech of steam renting the air.

 

He’d come back to himself then, alone, with a final impression of home slipping away.

 

'Doesn’t matter,' Bucky lied finally.

 

It did matter. He had wanted a family and a home so badly, and not only was it now out of reach, but now it felt—in his bones, so certainly—that he would have lost it even if he’d gone home after the war. If he’d gone home, he would have lost them anyways. Something would have happened, and just like now, it would have been his fault. Maybe Steve would’ve still died young, like they’d known he would before the serum made him so much healthier. Maybe Bucky and Peggy would’ve gotten married to raise his kids, and maybe Bucky would’ve lost his mind just as much as Peggy had, if forced to watch disease take her away.

 

He lied, 'It wasn’t real.'

 

'I don’t trust a guy who doesn’t have a dark side,' Tony put in. Bucky glared over at him.

 

'Tony, I really wouldn’t be trying to imply you don’t trust me, when your dark side created a robot that convinced genetically-enhanced twins to take down the entire team,' he snapped. 'Nat’s catatonic, Clint tazed a _kid_ , a dame at that, and I think you getting hit started this whole thing. Steve is _missing_. The rest you can blow out your barracks bag.'

 

'What the fuck does that mean?' Tony demanded.

 

'It means _shut the hell up_ ,' Bucky told him. 'We’ve got actual fucking problems over here, all right? Your robot is on the loose with two enhanced and probably my partner. This isn’t the time for you to get suspicious of jack. You have no right.'

 

'We’re teammates—' Tony tried, because whenever in the last age they’d been working together he hadn’t liked something, he’d invoked his unofficial title of lieutenant. Often, Bucky was willing to at least listen, consider. Now, Bucky laughed. It sounded bitter and sharp, like ruined and burnt coffee grounds.

 

'Consider yourself benched,' Bucky ordered. Tony’s mouth snapped shut. 'I don’t want to hear another word out of you until I ask for it.' Tony at least shut up at that, wandering to sit on the other side of the med equipment in the middle, slouching until he was practically out of Bucky’s sightline. 'Clint, where are we going?'

 

'A safe house,' he replied. 'We’ll spend the night, regroup, decide our next move.'

 

'You’re sure it’s genuinely a safe house? Not a holdover from SHIELD?' Bucky asked. Clint chuckled.

 

'Oh, I’m sure.' Clint was the only team member who hadn’t done something behind Bucky’s back, so Bucky believed him. He was certain enough to laugh about it, despite the fact nothing in the entire world could possibly be funny.

 

^^^

 

The robot was ranting now, too loudly, quickly, and angrily for Wanda to understand. She felt Pietro lose track of the robotic English too. He sat on a ledge in the stone antechamber, back in the abandoned fortress in the capital. Wanda had stood between her brother and the robot but now it was shouting. She felt herself move away, to the side, to safety, almost against her will. Life with SHIELD was filled with pain, and when something as fearsome as the robot ranted, SHIELD’s children knew to try to hide.

 

‘We did as we were told,’ Pietro snapped, lashing out finally. Wanda felt her head jerk to gape at him; she was afraid; could he not feel she was afraid? Did he not know they had to be careful of this monster? Didn’t he know she couldn’t protect them from it? Ultron laughed at him. The laugh was horrible, like acid. It was made worse as this version of Ultron began to wear out. The speakers hummed and distorted, breaking harshly against their eardrums as the subwoofers popped and boomed. She felt Pietro’s fear like her own, but it made him want to lash out at the robot in anger.

 

 _We have nowhere to go_ , she reminded him, whispering in their native tongue in his mind. He fell quiet, turning to look at her. She knew he could hear her without listening too, so she just held his eyes. He watched her, and she begged him to be silent, to hide with her, to wait for the robot to go build a new self.

 

She wasn’t sure she believed they had no options. Captain America had meant _Something_ amongst the children they had grown up with too. Even when they had been separated, they heard the same stories about him saving children during a big war and fighting only with a shield. Their time apart was when their doctors started using straps, and when the tests started to hurt as much as the punishments. Now, sometimes, the way Pietro slumped after he ran too fast for too long, Wanda swore he could feel a twinge where something in her own right leg had never healed right.

 

SHIELD had lied to them. They had hurt Pietro too, because Wanda sometimes had twinges that weren’t her own, mostly along her spine, between her shoulders. More time had gone by than they could account for time between them, and SHIELD had lied.

 

But everything they’d heard about Captain America had been the same, whispered as stories from prisoners and from innocent kids like them; it seemed truer. Everything they knew about SHIELD and about people who claimed world security had proven to be false; those people had tried to blow up the world. Maybe the kids had been telling the truth. Maybe the prisoners had been fighting on the right side. Maybe the Winter Soldier hadn’t lied to them and he could bring them to freedom. Maybe Captain America wasn’t the scourge Ultron believed him to be, believed the Avengers to be.

 

Eventually the robot left them to cower. He had new bodies to build. He had armies to manufacture.

 

Armies meant war, not peace. They were left to wait by the prison cells, wait for him to bring them on their next mission. She didn’t know if they could get out now from under what felt like rubble. When their building had actually fallen, she hadn’t been afraid. Pietro had thrown them under the bed; he had already saved them. They had been pressed together and she had felt his heartbeat against hers. She had known he wasn’t afraid then because his heart had been steady.

 

He wasn’t steady now and she was afraid. Pietro was angry now. She felt it in her ribcage.

 

_You deserve praise for taking a risk. You caught a ghost for him._

 

She could hear him, without listening. Ultron’s artificial silence only made it easier; she could tune out the Winter Soldier’s broken noises easily—could tune out the flashes of his life relit by her magic breaking thru his thoughts—because she could hear Pietro without even listening.

 

‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, softly. ‘It’s all right.’ Pietro’s hand fell onto her wrist. He wasn’t watching her, not now that he could feel her warm and alive beneath his touch.

 

‘What’s the Soldier thinking of?’ Pietro asked.

 

‘Do you remember when we heard the same stories about Captain America? And he rescued people?’ Wanda whispered. Pietro eyed her briefly, unimpressed. She felt like she was bringing up a fairy tale or a folk song. ‘Sometimes I think the things we both know but didn’t learn from _them_ are the only things that are true. We both know that Captain America rescued people.’

 

‘So?’ Pietro pressed.

 

‘I’ve let the Soldier go, but he’s remembering still, like I made him. I can see who the Soldier remembers if I watch,’ she whispered. ‘And he remembers Captain America from a long time ago; all those stories we heard were real. He lived them. Captain America is real; we fought him, you and I. The Soldier is one of the people who the Captain rescued. The Captain came for him; the Captain came for _him specifically_.’

 

‘He rescued the Winter Soldier?’ Pietro echoed, which of course was ridiculous. The Soldier was a weapon and everyone knew that; weapons had no freedom. Everyone feared him. He was an instrument and a shadow and nothing more.

 

‘Whoever the Winter Soldier was,’ Wanda replied. ‘Like, like whoever we were before we were changed. That person, the person the Soldier was: he fought alongside Captain America.’

 

‘Captain America rescued the Winter Soldier,’ Pietro repeated slowly, looking across the hall to the cell where the Soldier slumped against an ancient stone wall. He huddled, dim and black in his Kevlar. His arm glinted in the light. She could feel where his flesh ended under the metal pauldron. The servomotors of his arm were no more present in her extra senses than Ultron; she could feel instead his memory of when his arm had been shattered and ripped beyond recognition, hitting ice and rock but not water when the Soldier landed in a river, falling from a train. She could feel the Soldier drift in the icy water, pulled by the current in shock, before clawing against the ice to heave half of himself out. He laid there until blackness closed in; she could feel the call of the nothingness like he had then. She could feel hands grabbing at his shoulders, lashing him with rope, dragging him to a vehicle, taking him away.

 

‘I guess they took him back and finished,’ Wanda whispered. She shivered. She never wanted to go back. She didn’t know if she were finished but she knew if she went back it would end her. It would end Pietro. They couldn’t go back; they couldn’t. HYDRA had taken the Soldier back. Captain America had rescued him and he’d still been taken back and broken more. They’d refused Captain America’s rescue; what would HYDRA do to them?

 

‘But he belonged to enemies,’ Pietro said, unwilling to accept it. ‘SHIELD didn’t—’

 

‘SHIELD does not exist,’ Wanda reminded him. ‘From what he’s shown me, the Avengers—’ She hesitated. A Stark bomb had taken their parents, taken their home, taken their childhood, forced them into SHIELD’s clutches. Stark had done it and the Avengers were Stark thru-and-thru. ‘The Avengers did the right thing attacking our base; the men who ran it were the evil, not them. They’ve done the right thing, destroying both HYDRA and SHIELD. They were the same thing, and Strucker? He’s tortured us; he hasn’t tried to make peace—’

 

‘Wanda!’ Pietro snapped. ‘Strucker took us in when Stark saw our homes destroyed, our parents murdered—’

 

‘He _cut_ into us and all the others are gone,’ Wanda corrected. ‘We were _celled_ and we were _used_. We weren’t given new homes. We weren’t _given_ any family; they take family. They _separated us_ , Pietro,’ she reminded him, as if she had to. He looked away. He remembered the others as much as she did. ‘The people who made him the Soldier worked under the same banner as the people who changed us. I’m sure of it.’

 

‘If this is how it is, then we are weapons just like the Winter Soldier,’ Pietro reminded her. ‘If we were like the Soldier...’ He trailed off. ‘There’s no freedom for weapons, Wanda. We can be more, can’t we? We can finish this fight and Stark, all of the Avengers, will be dead and we will be free. The world would be free. Think of how much war Stark has created.’

 

‘The Commander of the Avengers is Captain America,’ Wanda told him. ‘The Captain America. The one who saved all those people. The wars were started by the men who used the Soldier. Stark has blood on his hands but he did not decide to start the flow. SHIELD did. HYDRA did. We would, if we stay here.’

 

‘No,’ Pietro whispered. ‘Wanda, there is nowhere else—’

 

 _‘I can feel the ghost crying, Pietro,’_ she admitted, following Pietro’s gaze to stare at Steve Rogers. They looked at him together. She could tell they were looking together, seeing the same thing thru each other’s eyes. Eventually, Pietro whispered to her.

 

 _‘You were right when you said we had nowhere to go._ ’

 

 _‘No, I wasn’t,’_ she said, just as quietly. He could always hear her. ‘We could go with the Soldier. He promised.’ Pietro’s heart twisted. He wanted to keep her safe and she wanted to jump into the unknown. She knew how her feelings must be burning at him; she could feel his scraping thru her skin.

 

‘He has no way to promise us anything,’ Pietro scoffed. ‘Look at him. He cowers and we cannot trust that because he thinks we would be safe that we will be.’

 

 _‘Can’t we trust the man who saved all those people?’_ Wanda asked. _‘Captain America loves him and he promised us. Surely we can trust Captain—’_

 

‘It was just a story!’ Pietro snapped, annoyed with her. He moved away. The distance felt artificially wide.

 

 _‘So was the ghost and here he is,’_ Wanda pointed out. Pietro knew she was right. ‘We should run. You can run so fast that they could never catch us.’ Her brother stared at her. She left her mind open, reaching out in invisible tendrils; she didn’t need fire to reach her twin. She was sure. She let him feel that.

 

‘We stay,’ Pietro decided. ‘I can’t trust them, Wanda. At least Ultron wants the same revenge as us. I’m your big brother; I can’t take this risk. I can’t gamble with your life.’ She could feel how afraid he was, how he didn’t know which way to tug them to keep them from being crushed this time; he’d saved them before and he didn’t know how to do it again. She drew back her mind before he could feel too acutely her disappointment.

 

There was nowhere safe to roll.

 

^^^

 

Bucky stared at the house that appeared as they summited a small, rolling hill. He realised where Clint had brought them, and he wondered if times were that desperate or if Clint trusted them that much. The house was beautiful, well-maintained, and he could hear the sound of cows faintly in the dairy barns beyond the next hill. He followed Clint and Natasha up the steps of the porch, reaching to touch Nat’s elbow and help Clint frogmarch her up the steps.

 

'I’m fine,' she told them. She had colour back in her face after the few hours of flying; he did trust that she was all right. It didn’t help the worry in his chest, in his ribcage. The worry was misplaced but Steve was missing.

 

'What is this place?' Thor asked.

 

'Safe house,' Tony offered.

 

'Honey,' Clint called as they moved past the foyer into a living room and kitchen. 'I’m home.' A hugely pregnant woman appeared, looking a bit taken aback at the horde of superheroes in their home. Bucky couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe Clint trusted them here. He couldn’t believe how beautiful Laura was; her picture did her no justice, and her hesitant smile had crinkles at its corner.

 

'Hey,' Clint said a bit ruefully. 'Company. Sorry I didn’t call ahead.' He kissed her cheek and she let him, still staring at the Avengers assembled in her living room. 'This is my wife, Laura,' he introduced, for the benefit of those who were floored she existed.

 

'I know all of your names,' she admitted. Bucky smiled and nodded cordially.

 

'Ma’am,' he greeted. 'Thank you for having us in your home.'

 

'It’s apparently no trouble,' she said, pointedly for her husband. Clint was saved from having to apologize for unexpected houseguests by the arrival of two kids. Bucky stared at them as they hugged their father and as Clint cooed over them. He couldn’t have cooed over the children in the dream. Bucky couldn’t even have looked those imaginary children in the eye; he wouldn’t have been the adored father Clint clearly was. He couldn’t have balanced war and home. He would have had to have chosen one; after the ice, home had been taken. All he had left was war.

 

That wasn’t true, he knew. He had Steve. He had Tony and Bruce, when they weren't being lying fools, and he had Pepper and Sam and Rhodey and Nat and even Clint. He had people here in the new world. He had Sam and their veteran friends, and for a little while longer, he had what was left of Peggy. Of course, Tony was a lying fool, Pepper didn’t belong in war, Nat had lied to him too, and Steve was fucking gone. Clint brought him home to his family at the risk of those innocents’ precious lives. His heart felt tight all of a sudden. He wondered how rude it would be to go sulk on the porch like the brooding asshole he was.

 

'Look at your face!' Clint said, grasping his daughter. 'Oh, my goodness!'

 

'Did you bring Auntie Nat?' she asked, sweet and almost too innocent for Bucky to believe. He didn’t spend a lot of time around children anymore. It had been years since he’d lived with his sisters, when they were small and clung to him and their parents like that. He stared at her.

 

'Why don’t you hug her and found out?' Nat said, crouching low to swoop the kid up in her arms. Thor left, and Bucky took the excuse to follow him out. Clint’s home was warm and safe but it felt stifling to Bucky. He could feel the bitterness of bile at the back of his throat. He felt like his presence there guaranteed something bad would fall upon that family. He couldn’t believe Clint had taken them here; he couldn’t believe Clint trusted them here. He couldn’t believe how big of a risk he felt that placed on Clint’s family.

 

'Thor,' he called, and Thor turned. He looked as shaken as the rest of them; not even the god could repel Wanda Maximoff’s telepathy.

 

'I saw something in that dream,' Thor told him, no preamble. 'I need answers. I won't find them here.' With that, he spun his hammer and took off. Bucky stared at the place the god had been standing. He sighed heavily, breathing so deeply as to almost hurt his lungs. He didn’t like the way this felt: the team fractured, Steve gone again, and a family in the house behind him to remind him that he could never have had one like it. He pushed a hand thru his hair, scratching at his scalp. He supposed he ought to go back inside. He should be a polite houseguest, offer to help with dinner or make the beds. He shouldn’t be paralyzed by nothing but a vague, unfamiliar fear. He didn’t know if he were strong enough to get thru this.

 

He hoped this particular brand of weakness came from the Maximoff magic. He hoped this brand of weakness wasn’t his.

 

^^^

 

Bucky was Captain America, and no matter whether he was afraid or not, he had a certain role to play and a certain responsibility to others. When a little girl asked him to come inside and eat dinner with her, he found himself literally unable to say no. He left the enormous woodpile he’d made, working off steam, and Nicole took his hand as she pulled him inside, babbling about drawings and Legos. Her hand felt impossibly small beneath his. He had forgotten how small children were, which was silly, but it had been years since his sisters had been this little. Her fingers wrapped around two of his, holding tight and leading him as if she knew everything in the world. She dragged him into the kitchen and abandoned him at the counter.

 

He thanked Laura, who gave him a hot plate of food and made him sit at the table. Nicole appeared beside him, handing him a drawing of a butterfly. She ran off before he could compliment it, circling the table to beg attention from Nat, and he watched Nat interact with the kid easily. He missed his family suddenly, fervently missed his sisters and absently missed the now-older-than-him children of theirs he still hadn’t gotten brave enough to contact. Nat smiled as Nicole told her a secret, and Bucky watched with wonder at how soft Nat’s edges became the second those kids came in a room. He wondered if he would have been that soft when his nieces and nephews had been small; he wondered if he would have been that soft if he had ever had his own kids.

 

'Is this the part where you tell me you don’t appreciate me being around?' a familiar voice asked from behind Bucky. His shoulders tensed immediately, and he turned in his chair. Nick Fury stood there, looking painfully normal without his moronic, black leather trench coat. Bucky sighed. 'It’s good to see you, Captain Barnes,' Fury offered.

 

'I’m sure,' he said flatly. 'Why are you here?' he asked, perhaps a bit more confrontationally than he needed to. Nat glared at him over Nicole’s head.

 

'Can you two bury the hatchet?' she asked pointedly. Fury sat at the head of the table, which Bucky resented without real cause.

 

'He tried to murder everyone New York City, sued me for my own DNA, and then spied on me, for over a year,' Bucky pointed out. 'So, no, I’m still kind of upset.'

 

'I was glad to hear President Ellis officially pardoned Private Rogers for his actions as the Winter Soldier,' Fury offered. Bucky glared at him. Laura’s delicious dinner tasted like nothing, suddenly, and Bucky held his temper very tight to his chest, unwilling to yell in front of two innocent and precious fucking kids. He dropped his fork and his hand clenched almost uncomfortably. His nails dug into his palm.

 

'They weren’t his actions; both international and federal law point that out. Common sense points that out. The fact that he was _officially pardoned_ was an insult,' Bucky said, very calmly. ‘He should never have been charged.’ Tony entered from the same doorway as Fury, and Bucky refused to read into that. He was sure if anyone had summoned Fury here, it was Hill at HQ, maybe Nat or Clint, but certainly not Tony. Bucky might have felt at sea since he found out Tony lied to him, but he was damn sure Fury was not the director of Tony Stark. 'What can we do for you, Director?'

 

'I ain’t the director of anything anymore, but I don’t come empty-handed,' Fury replied, folding his hands on the table in front of him. 'I come with information.'

 

'Fantastic,' Bucky grumbled to himself. Everyone ignored him, as well they should have.

 

'Ultron took you folks out of play to buy himself time,' Fury said. Bucky already knew that. He hoped to God Fury had something approaching useful to say. 'My contacts all say he's building something. The amount of vibranium he made off with: I don't think it's just one thing.'

 

'Is he building—robots? Drones?' Bucky glanced at Tony, unsure what the right word would be. 'Not just replacements for the Iron Legion we destroyed, but an actual fighting force of robots with his AI as a base programme. He wants to become better, better than us. He keeps building bodies; he sent, like, seven versions of himself to kill Strucker.'

 

'He keeps building person bodies,' Tony added. 'The human form is inefficient; biologically speaking, we're outmoded. But he keeps coming back to it.' Bucky rubbed the back of his neck, trying to press out the stress tension he could feel there. Something wasn’t right, and he didn’t know what it was.

 

'When you two programmed him to protect the human race, you amazingly failed,' Nat said dryly. Tony sighed at her.

 

'Is he going to build hundreds of those machines for the inevitable showdown?' Bucky asked. 'If he is, we need to find out where and stop manufacturing.'

 

'He could be,' Tony allowed. 'The twins are dangerous, but they’re not an army. If humanity is really so far below him, maybe he’s making an army of droids to fight his battle.'

 

'If you didn’t trust humans with peace, why would he?' Bucky agreed, and Tony glared. Bucky didn’t apologize, but he did look away. 'What about Ultron himself?' Bucky asked Fury, watching his own hands.

 

'He’s easy to track; he's everywhere,' Nick said. 'Guy’s multiplying faster than a Catholic rabbit. Still doesn't help us get an angle on any of his plans though.' Before Bucky could ask where exactly everywhere was, and what Ultron was doing in these places, Tony interrupted.

 

'He still going after the codes?' Tony asked.

 

'Yes, he is,' Fury agreed, 'but he's not making any headway.' Tony scoffed. Bucky raised a brow at him, questioning.

 

'Nuclear launch codes?' Bucky clarified, because he still wasn’t sure what type of code they meant. He was fairly certain they meant a password of sorts that would send horrifying missiles all over the world, not the type of code Tony used to programme things or the type of code Bucky used to pass along radios in the war. Tony sent him a confirming nod.

 

'I cracked the Pentagon's firewall, in high school, on a dare,' Tony pointed out. ‘Why shouldn’t Ultron bust in that easily?’

 

'Yeah, well, I contacted our friends at the NEXUS about that—' Nick began.

 

'NEXUS?' Bucky echoed. It was a testament to how long he’d been awake in the new millennium that his face didn’t heat for a second to ask twice in a minute what something was.

 

'It’s the world internet hub,' Bruce told him. 'Every byte of data flows through there; it’s the fastest access on Earth.'

 

'So what'd they say?' Clint prompted from the kitchen counter.

 

'He’s fixated on the missiles, but the codes are constantly being changed, by parties unknown,' Nick said.

 

'So, we have an ally,' Nat posited.

 

'Ultron’s has an enemy,' Nick corrected. ‘That might not be the same thing.’

 

‘Yeah,’ Bucky agreed. 'He claims we’re his only target, even if we know that’s not true. If he has an enemy, they either know Ultron will tear down a lot more than our team, or they are, for some reason, very protective of the World’s Mightiest Heroes.' He hated that stupid slogan. He turned to its progenitor, Tony. 'Is the NEXUS a real place, or is it an Internet place?'

 

'It’s an actual building, in Oslo,' Tony promised. Bucky nodded.

 

'You might want to go find our unknown party,' Bucky said.

 

'I’m off the bench?' Tony needled, even as he stood. Bucky rolled his eyes.

 

'Don’t think you’re getting off scot-free,' he replied. 'I’d tell you how I feel about all this right now, but there are little, tiny ears in the room.'

 

'Captain America doesn’t like that kind of talk?' Nat joked. Bucky resisted the urge to flip her off. 'Well, this is good times, boss, but I was kind of hoping when I saw you, you'd have more than that,' Nat said to Fury.

 

'I do,' he promised. 'I have you. Back in the day, I had eyes everywhere, ears everywhere else. Here we all are, back on Earth, with nothing but our wit, and our will to save the world.' He stood, dramatic, and Bucky resented that more than anything he had all day. 'So stand,' Fury said. 'Outwit the platinum bastard.' Bucky’s mind drew up the image of a man literally made of platinum, and an awful and brilliant idea popped into his head.

 

'Bruce, could you stick vibranium in Helen’s printer?' Bucky wondered. The room fell very silent. Everyone’s eyes fell on him, and Bucky raised a brow, expecting an answer. 'I mean, you can put almost anything in Tony’s 3D printer.’ Steve and he had printed all sorts of weird stuff when Tony showed them how it worked; Bucky had made marzipan and they’d eaten dozens of tiny figurines. ‘Does hers work the same way?'

 

'It does,' Bruce said. 'You’re right. Ultron doesn’t think the human race needs to be protected; he thinks they need to evolve. Ultron's going to evolve. He heard everything we said in the days leading up to his birth, of sorts. He knows what Helen Cho can do; he knows she’s got the next step in bio-organic development, in a lab in Korea.' Bucky stood, his mind suddenly racing and orders coming up from the woodwork.

 

'Bruce, you need to get back to HQ; get Fury to take you. We need to know where Ultron is building these things, and maybe Laura’s lovely home isn’t the best place to start looking from,' he said. 'Tony, go find out who’s messing around in Norway. Nat, Clint, you come with me. We’re going to go stop Ultron from getting to Helen Cho.'

 

^^^

 

Helen was alive, and so were nine of eleven of her staff, but they were functionally too late. A new power had been put in the cradle, something Helen could barely warn him about past the lingering effects of Wanda Maximoff’s hypnosis and the pain of the energy burns. The cradle was already gone; it was on the move. Bucky was always too fucking late.

 

'I lost him!' Bucky shouted into his com, the wind from the shattered train windows scaring him more than it had any right to. He had to keep it together; people were going to die if he couldn’t. People would die even if he could. 'He’s headed your way!' His knees were shaking; his breath caught at the wind and the certainty that he didn’t know how to slow them down. He didn’t understand what the hell was wrong with him; he could grapple a robot bent on world domination with no reservations, but the second he was in a runaway train with cold air stinging at his face, his heart pounded double time and his hands threatened to shake so badly that he might have dropped his shield without magnetic relays holding it in place. He wondered if Tony knew.

 

'Nat, we gotta go,' Clint said in his ear. 'Nat!' he shouted a second later. Bucky’s heart skipped; fuck, she had better be OK. 'Cap, do you have eyes on Nat?' he demanded, as if Bucky weren’t trapped in a train he couldn’t slow down.

 

'If you have the package, return to HQ!' Bucky snapped. 'Secure it, and secure it now! That’s an order!' He turned to the twins, who apparently were on his side now. He didn’t know what changed their minds and he didn’t have time to care. They watched him warily, just like all war orphans watched men with guns, like the animalistic twins he’d met when liberating a concentration camp on the German border of Poland, sliced and starved and sick, like the kids they’d pulled out of cattle cars almost baked to death from summer heat in Northern Italy. Their eyes held as much suffering as suspicion, like the eyes of every other Roma child he’d ever seen; he hated it so much. His heart ached. He didn’t have time to feel it, because wind was whipping at him and civilians were screaming behind him and his heart was already racing from fear—it didn’t have time for grief—and he had to stop the train.

 

'You,' he said, pointing at Pietro. 'Clear the civilians in our path.' The kid took off without hesitation, a good soldier at least. Bucky wished he hadn’t tacked on the at least; what was wrong with him? Bucky turned to the sister. 'You: can you stop the train?' he asked. He hoped. Wanda looked impossibly young, suddenly, staring at him with her wary eyes and such an enormous demand on her. She nodded.

 

She was so young. She was less than ten years his junior, but, by God, he could barely remember being that young; at twenty-five, he’d already taken up the mantle of Captain America. He’d already liberated that first POW factory, liberated Steve and his team. He’d considered himself committed to Steve for life, as close to married as two men in their day could get, and he hadn’t known enough about the effects of Steve’s serum to change his mind about the reality that Steve’s health would see Bucky considering himself a widow by the time they were thirty. He didn’t think, looking at the fear on Wanda’s face, that it was fair to ask this of her. If he had a choice, if he could stop the train without her, he wouldn’t be standing in front of her hoping she could. He wondered if he’d been this scared the first time he’d run into battle; it seemed like an awfully long time ago. He could barely recall.

 

She stopped the train, her face pale and her knees shaky after she’d done so. Bystanders began helping people out of the train, reaching out to assist people climbing over torn and hot running boards, ruined steps, and destroyed asphalt. Bucky tucked his hand under Wanda’s elbow, leading her shaky feet out of the train. For a brief second, he carried her, just taking her entire weight by her frame and placing her gently on the smooth paved road, away from hot rubble. She wavered, so he held on to her arm, loosely, in case he were unwelcome. She spotted her twin, panting, not far from them; she yanked out of Bucky’s grip and he followed her quickly.

 

'I’m fine,' Pietro gasped, waving off his sister’s concern half-heartedly. 'I just need to take a minute.'

 

'We don’t have a minute,' Bucky pointed out regretfully. He hid his regret; he was a captain and he couldn’t let them know he didn’t want to keep going either.

 

'The cradle: did you get it?' Wanda demanded, turning to Bucky, even as her hand stayed on her brother’s shoulder. He nodded.

 

'It’s on its way to our headquarters,' Bucky replied. 'My team has orders to dismantle whatever’s inside.'

 

'Stark won’t do that,' she told him in her accented rush, sounding blindingly sure. He frowned at her. He thought of the last few days. They’d really shattered his understanding of the team. The last few years, fighting alongside Tony in New York, accepting his help and his home, and dismantling HYDRA together, he’d grown to trust the man. Tony had felt like family, but Tony had taken the sceptre and built a machine and lied. He touched his com.

 

'Iron Man, come in,' he called. He looked up at the sky as he waited, as if he could see the lack of response. ‘Tony, come in, now.' Silence met his ears. He risked a glance at Wanda; she avoided his gaze. 'Anyone on coms?' Maybe he was further from them than he thought, after the train barrelled thru who the hell knew where.

 

'Ultron can't tell the difference between saving the world and destroying it,' Wanda reminded him. 'Where do you think he gets that?' Bucky sighed, looking over the wreckage of the train and the street they’d torn apart. He couldn’t stay to assist; he had to go prevent another Ultron from being formed in his absence. He had to take two enhanced twins with him. He couldn’t do enough. He couldn’t do it all. His worry tasted like acid on the back of his tongue. It would surely dissolve the muscle and leave him without words.

 

'Where’s Steve?' he asked Wanda, forcing it down. 'The Winter Soldier,' he prompted when she only glanced at her brother. 'Where is he? You hit him with your magic; we haven’t seen him since.'

 

'I controlled him, somewhat,' she admitted. 'He is— _willful_ ,' she said, looking to her brother. Bucky read a request for permission; Wanda didn’t know how much to give away. By the time he glanced at Pietro, the kid had schooled his expression. 'It was difficult, to control him,’ she told him. ‘My touch shook loose a lot of—horrible things.'

 

'What happened?' Bucky asked. His stomach clenched with worry; the only thing he had ever wanted was to keep Steve safe, keep him far from the battles he insisted on fighting and he couldn’t even do that now, seventy years past their death.

 

'All the ghost stories we heard about him as children,' Wanda said. 'But I could feel what he felt when he did them. He was so afraid. Most of his head was like a machine and a buried part was crying.' Bucky felt sick.

 

'It was awful,' she admitted. Her brother’s hand found hers.

 

'Ultron didn’t trust her hold on him,' Pietro reported. 'He’s locked up at the base in Sokovia. If Wanda was not there to make him, he would not move. We didn’t need locks to hold him; it is like he is broken.'

 

'God damn it,' Bucky said. Every inch of him wanted to go get Steve, bring him home and make sure he was all right. Every inch of him wanted to find him, hold him, apologize a thousand times for letting him lose his autonomy again. Every inch of him screamed to get Steve back and get him safe. He knew damn well that couldn’t be his immediate priority, not with the cradle and all its potential heading to a friend he couldn’t trust. He dropped his head between his shoulders, squeezing his eyes shut and giving himself a moment to get it the fuck together. He didn’t have the fucking time to be afraid. He couldn’t afford it.

 

'Let’s get to New York.'

 

^^^

 

'I am only gonna say this _once_ ,' Bucky called, hiding behind the burn of rage the absolute desolation seeing Tony trying again stabbed thru his torso.

 

'How about _n-unce_?' Tony asked from the highest point in the split-level lab, cool and unfettered by Bucky’s appearance, by his concern, by his fear. That hurt worse, somehow. It felt like Tony was disregarding their friendship, disregarding his post as lieutenant, disregarding his commitment to stop building weapons and profiting from war.

 

'You gotta know how bad this looks to me, man,' Bucky said, waving vaguely over the lab. He could feel the twins behind him, moving in closer and ratcheting up the tension by an order of magnitude. 'Jesus, do you really think the Ultron project needs a second prototype?' Bucky demanded. 'We’re not finished rescuing our teammates from the first one! People have been killed! People have _died_!'

 

'Look, this is not the same thing at all,' Tony tried. 'JARVIS’s operational matrix—'

 

' _Really_ , Tony?' Bucky shouted, in disbelief. ‘Are you fucking serious? It is the same thing! You’re making the exact same shitty play!’ He made his way to the cradle, peering into the glass and looking with horror at the red, recognizably human face. He didn’t make any effort to hide his reaction, the revulsion he felt.

 

'Jesus Christ, Tony! Are you trying to put another version of your software into a thing you _didn’t make_ and _don’t understand_?' Bucky snapped. 'How is this not the same God damn mistake?'

 

'No. It's not that,' Tony said easily. 'No, I’m helping _Bruce_ put another version—'

 

'Oh, my God,' Bucky said. He couldn’t believe Tony would do this. Bucky had given orders. He’d trusted Tony to follow them; he had never once been wrong to trust his team. What good was a captain if he couldn’t trust his team? How would they ever stop Ultron if Tony and Bruce wouldn’t stop lying? How could they ever save Steve? 'Bruce, shut it down.’

 

‘Or else what?’ Tony asked.

 

‘Or else?’ Bucky echoed. He couldn't believe Tony was asking him _or else_. ‘Or else _nothing_ , Tony: _shut it down._  That’s an order.'

 

'Don’t!' Tony said, stilling Bruce, a hand outreached as tho he could grab his friend away from the cradle’s controls. 'Cap, JARVIS has been beating Ultron from the inside—'

 

'We can beat Ultron! If I had a God damn team that would be honest with me, we could beat Ultron!' Bucky shouted. 'Tony, Ultron made a weapon! This is a weapon! We don’t need a new weapon; we need to disarm the last one set loose! Shut it down!'

 

'Nope,' Tony said. 'Not gonna happen.'

 

'You don't know what you're doing,' Bucky said. Ultron built this body; why would they trust it? Why would they take hardware from a dealer of war and destruction? Couldn’t Tony see that was nothing but a recipe for disaster?

 

'And you do?' Bruce challenged. Bucky wondered, suddenly, if Bruce was ever going to shut it down, if Tony’s stilling call was a wasted breath. 'She’s not in your head?' he sneered.

 

'I know you're angry,' Wanda said, trying to efface herself and the damage she’d raked over the team. Bucky knew it wouldn’t work.

 

'Oh, we're way past that. I could choke the life out of you and never change a shade,' Bruce said, violence dripping from every word.

 

'Bruce!' Bucky said, shocked. 'They’re kids, all right?'

 

'What, so they don’t know any better?' Bruce demanded. 'No consequences for children, for tearing the team apart?'

 

'After everything that's happened—' Bucky tried, unsure how he could even explain. Consequences didn’t always equal justice. These two had been children in a broken building when they were offered a way out; they’d been prisoners since then. Consequences weren’t always the same thing as justice, even when Bucky himself understood the urge to shear Wanda down into nothing for having hurt them, hurt Nat, taken Steve.

 

'That’s nothing compared to what's coming!' Tony put in.

 

'You don't know what's in there!' Wanda cried. 'This isn’t a game!'

 

'Really, 'cause it seems like I’m scoring all the points,' Tony quipped.

 

 _'The creature—_ ' Wanda began. Pietro flashed out of Bucky’s vision, suddenly. He flinched, covering his eyes instinctively as high-pressure hoses ripped from ball valves and whipped briefly, spewing gases and steam, before the emergency valves cut off the flow. Pietro came to a stop, solidifying out of movement too fast to see, satisfied as alarms in the cradle sounded.

 

'No, no, no, go on,' he said to Bruce and Tony, unbelievably condescending thru his youth and accent. 'You were saying?'

 

The floor shattered; a bullet flew past them all. Bucky staggered backwards, away from the section of the floor which disappeared into a wave of shards. Pietro fell thru to the manufacturing lab below; his sister shrieked for him, her red fire spiralling towards him. Bruce moved in a flash, hauling her into a choke hold. She panicked; she had been one of HYDRA’s children; like Steve fresh out of Azzano, she froze still and submissive when someone larger and stronger than her laid anything across her neck. Tony rushed a computer, trying to salvage what he could, and Bucky shouted his name uselessly, begged him to stop. His instinct was to haul his shield, break the servers behind Tony, stop this madness—but he couldn’t, could he? He couldn’t throw his shield at a friend; he couldn’t believe Tony was risking this, risking it again, when Steve was gone and everything was falling apart.

 

'Go ahead; piss me off,' Bruce snarled, and even without her powers infecting the space, Bucky would have been able to feel the terror that lit up in her.

 

'That is enough!' Bucky roared, louder than he felt he had ever shouted. 'Enough, Bruce, Jesus Christ! She’s just a child; put her down.'

 

Bruce’s eyes snapped to him, like he was realising the magnitude of what he’d done.

 

'Tony,' Bucky went on, his voice going soft without his permission, as Bruce released Wanda. She touched her chest, staggering away from Bruce with big eyes, but she wasn’t gasping. Her thin sneakers slipped over the shards of safety glass on the floor; she caught herself on nothing.

 

'Come on, man,' he said uselessly. 'This is a risk, right; you see that? This is crazy, right? Talk to me. Why are you doing this? How is this worth it?' Tony stared at him. After a horrifying moment, Bucky realised his friend didn’t have a good answer. He didn’t have an answer at all. It wasn’t worth it; Tony had done it anyway. Tony had done it twice. Tony had done it to him.

 

Bucky flinched again as glass shattered anew. Lightning filled the lab, dancing across the ceiling. Wanda screamed. Bucky felt himself reaching for her, pulling her away from the sparks spitting from the cradle, tucking her vulnerable spine and body behind his shield and dragging her away.

 

It was Thor, he realised, as lightning lit up his cape and his hammer, as the god gave a war-cry and flashed a jewel in his palm. Bucky hid his eyes, turning his face away from the electric storm which up close was not unlike the explosive Tesseract on the Valkyrie, dissolving Schmitt and taking away Bucky’s hope at surviving.

 

A live, real, red-faced nightmare surged up from the cradle, breaking the metal apart.

 

'Everyone, stand down!' Bucky shouted, keeping Wanda behind himself. 'We don’t know what it is; do not engage!' The creature floated, observing them, like a cat deciding if the prey were worth the pounce. Bucky barely breathed; he didn’t dare to move. Not even Tony tried to break the tense silence.

 

'I’m sorry,' the red face said eventually, floating without sound and examining one’s own palms curiously. Bucky shivered at the voice, so much like JARVIS but reverberating in a way the computer's never had. 'This is odd,' it added, as if deciding. Bucky followed the nightmare’s gaze to Thor’s patient, open face.

 

Buck could feel himself shaking. He was being so stupid; the Red Skull had evaporated into whatever portal the Tesseract had opened into one of space’s nebulas; Bucky had seen the red body before Thor had thrust his too-similar magic into the box. It wasn’t the same thing and it couldn’t be. It didn’t even look like it, or sound like it, past the skin. Loki’s staff had been a power, but Loki had still sought out the Tesseract. The Tesseract had created the bombs, not the Red Skull; the connection wasn't there except in Bucky's fear. The serum in Bucky’s DNA could create a new Red Skull; the stone Thor had put into the cradle could not.

 

'Thank you,' the red body said to Thor. It was courteous. Bucky straightened, releasing his protective hold on Wanda. Something warmed inside him, the same shade of red as the creature’s skin; it felt like Wanda’s fire, soothing his fear. He glanced down at her; he couldn’t see the fire but he could feel it was her. She was watching him carefully, her hand afraid and close on a strap of his shield’s harness across his shoulders, like she wasn’t willing to separate from him lest his team make her a target again. He shifted his weight to keep her standing half-behind his shoulders; she kept the fear from stopping him from thinking clearly.

 

'Thor, what is this?' he asked, his voice level.

 

'I’ve had a vision,' Thor said. 'There was a ribbon of truth in the world the witch showed me. I sought it out in the Water of Sight. I saw a whirlpool that sucks in all hope of life, and at its centre was that.' He pointed his giant hand, and Bucky noted the yellow stone from Loki’s staff buried in the centre of the red body’s head.

 

'What, the gem?' Bruce asked.

 

'It is the Mind Stone,' Thor said. 'It’s one of the six Infinity Stones, the greatest power in the universe, unparalleled in its destructive capabilities.' Wanda rushed to ease the surge of cold fear that caused in Bucky, instantly, imagining the photos of an annihilated Japan and the bombs from his plane that SHIELD had held for so long, which HYDRA could have used in the years between Bucky’s discovery and his takedown of SHIELD and HYDRA.

 

'Then _why_ would you bring it—' he snapped, using anger as a veneer to hide the terror not even Wanda could soothe.

 

'Because Stark is right,' Thor said. Bucky resisted an urge to toss an annoyed hand in the air. He glanced at Tony, who didn’t crow or cow.

 

'Oh, it's definitely the end times,' Bruce muttered. Bucky bristled at the blasé needle at Tony, as tho Bruce hadn’t bought into Tony’s nonsense hook-line-and-sinker twice over the past week, creating the thing which might end them all.

 

'The Avengers cannot defeat Ultron,' Thor said heavily.

 

'Not alone,' the red body offered. Its feet settled onto the glass floor; it strode a few paces.

 

'It sounds like JARVIS,' Bucky said. 'Why? Isn’t JARVIS dead?'

 

'I found JARVIS’s protocols protecting the nuclear codes,' Tony said. 'He didn’t even know he was in there until I pieced him back together. He’s been keeping Ultron from his goal all this time; because he couldn’t get the weapons of mass destruction we’ve already made, he’s been stalled. He has to make his own, while in the meantime, I left the base protocols where they are; they’re keeping the codes safe even from me, and from Ultron, so who else could possibly—'

 

'Tony,' Bucky warned.

 

'So I remade JARVIS’s matrix into,' Tony said, gesturing at the red thing, the humanoid vibranium flesh, 'something new.'

 

'Ultron started you,' Bucky said, addressing the red thing. 'Why shouldn’t we destroy you like we have to destroy him?'

 

'You think I'm a child of Ultron?' the thing asked, calm, like it needed to know to answer Bucky’s question. Bucky shrugged, helpless.

 

'I don’t know what the fuck you are,' he admitted. 'I swear to God, you better tell me.'

 

'I am not Ultron,' the thing assured him. 'I’m not JARVIS. I am—' he tried, before finishing, 'I am.'

 

That was oddly comforting. Bucky met the weird, level gaze of the red thing. It wasn’t Tony’s creation; it wasn’t Thor’s. Just like Bucky was just someone who was still alive and therefore had to fight, it was and that was all.

 

'I looked in your head and saw annihilation,' Wanda challenged it. Bucky had heard their story of desertion; he couldn’t let the red thing’s original goal to become a reality, he knew that.

 

'Look again,' the thing invited, cordial and sincere.

 

'Yeah,' Clint scoffed, from below, where he’d shot out the floor. 'Her seal of approval means jack shit to me.' Bucky didn’t try to argue that; he trusted Wanda for this at least. She didn’t say anything, but she looked down thru the glass floor at her brother.

 

'Pietro, you good?' Bucky called down, because he needed to get out of this lab. A good section of the floor was missing; he had a good excuse to move them along. The kid offered a dry thumbs-up. 'Clint, things were getting tense up here, I admit, but removing a third of the floor via gunshot, in future? Not the best cooler.' Clint lifted his foot from Pietro’s hip, adjusting his grip on his gun, clearly turning the safety back on with his thumb.

 

'Well, I didn’t realise they were with you,' Clint admitted. He holstered his gun cooly. Pietro glared from his spot on the ground and amongst the glass.

 

'That’s fair,' Bucky allowed. 'Let’s—everyone and—this—go to the sitting room, make our plan. The twins know where Steve and Natasha are.’

 

'Oh, sweet,' Clint said. 'Hey, y’all right?' he asked, offering Pietro a hand. The kid was muttering curses. They settled in the living room, on the same couches where they’d been when Ultron had burst out of the now-shattered lab. Bucky didn’t appreciate the déja vu.

 

'So, what is this thing?' Buck asked, as it grew clothes or the illusion of clothes for itself.

 

'The powers of Bucky’s children—' Thor began, the Allspeak’s awkward translation of the phrase _the Captain's child soldiers_ drawing up the little miracles Bucky had seen in the dream. He couldn’t help it; he saw their little faces and his heart swelled with love and pride for the briefest of seconds, remembering how amazing they had been to see, how _perfect—_

 

'—the horrors in our heads, Ultron himself,' Thor said. Bucky remembered the blood red juice and the slices of screaming and sirens; he remembered the impossibility of Peggy’s lucid, young smile, the home he’d never have—

 

'They all came from the Mind Stone, and they're nothing compared to what it can unleash,' Thor said. 'But with it on our side, the battle will surely be ours. The adage that a single warrior and a single strike of a sword may make the battle’s difference is often true, but in this fight, we shall need much more than one cut. We shall need the progenitor of the battle. We will need it to aid us in our mission. Without it, we shall surely fail.'

 

'Well?' Bucky prompted, turning his head towards but not meeting the eye of the red face. 'Are you on our side?'

 

'I’m not sure it is that simple,' the thing hedged. Bucky felt rage explode inside of him, so hot and unexpected he simply closed his eyes and let Clint snap out a retort. He had known Clint would shout at that; he let Clint say just what they were both thinking.

 

'Are you out of your fucking mind?' Clint snapped. 'Shit better get real simple, real soon.'

 

'I am on the side of life,' the thing explained. Bucky didn’t see how that wasn’t simple; he wanted to punch the vibranium disaster into next month. 'Ultron isn’t. He will end it all.'

 

'What’s he waiting for?' Tony asked.

 

'You,' the thing admitted. ‘He hates you the most.’

 

'In Sokovia?' Bucky confirmed. 'I have the Sokovian officials organizing an evacuation of the capital already, off-line, so Ultron can’t see. By the time we fly there, the evacuation transport will be ready. Unless Ultron is actively monitoring the disruptions to the city bus and charter schedules, he won’t notice the evacuation points until we start using them.'

 

'If we're wrong about you, if you're the monster that Ultron made you to be,' Bruce began, as tho he hadn’t been an equal parent to the nightmare that Thor and Tony had been, 'we would have to destroy you too.' The thing considered.

 

'I don't want to kill Ultron,' it admitted. 'He’s unique, and he's in pain. But that pain will roll over the earth, so he must be destroyed: every form he's built, every trace of his presence on the net. We have to act now and not one of us can do it without the others.' That at least Bucky knew was true. They would need Nat and Steve too; he prayed to God that they would be all right just a little while longer.

 

'Maybe I am a monster,' the thing said. 'I don't think I'd know if I were one. I'm not what you are, and not what you intended. So there may be no way to make you trust me. But we need to go.' It scooped Mjolnir from its resting spot on a counter-height table. It carried the hammer briefly thru the air, the metal humming as it made its way towards Thor. Thor took Mjolnir without delay.

 

Bucky stared as the red faced nightmare made its way out. 'Right,' Thor said simply, as tho that resolved everyone’s concerns. Bucky had to admit it had been an inadvertently compelling argument. Thor clapped Tony once on the shoulder. Tony stumbled briefly under the force. 'Well done.'

 

Bucky sighed.

 

'We are go in three minutes,' he decided, no sympathy for those who weren’t already suited up. 'Get what you need.'

 

^^^

 

Nat came to with the unfortunately familiar feeling of a concussion beating against her skull. She held in a groan and tried to sit up. Her body ached and she’d come to on a cold, stone floor. Her movement was noticed immediately; she saw Ultron, shoulders hunched as if sad, working at a table covered in parts and ruined mechanics.

 

'Oh, good, you’re awake,' Ultron greeted, too familial to be comforting. She wondered how much of Tony was genuinely batting around in that robotic head. 'I wasn’t sure you'd wake up. I hoped you would; I wanted to show you.' He waved a hand vaguely over the huge room they were in, dimly lit and filled with machines.

 

'I don't have anyone else,' he admitted. He sounded genuinely sad, lonely, even. She wondered if he were human enough to be manipulated like she manipulated marks; she wondered if he knew enough about her to give her no chances. 'He’s been useless since the twins left.' Nat craned her neck, following the line of his gaze. There were a series of cells behind her, and Steve sat in the middle one, looking despondent, unaware. He didn’t notice her, didn’t look over at the sound of Ultron's voice. Nat sat, wincing and letting out the smallest gasp.

 

'You’ve been controlling him?' she guessed, wrapping a hand around her bruised ribs. She hated injuries to her ribcage more than any other. The constant ache made her feel delicate. A broken arm could be isolated and ignored; ribs were too essential and there was no way to avoid breathing. Figured she got a hell of a wallop before waking up in an abandoned fortress. 'What have you made him do?'

 

'Nothing,' Ultron replied flatly. 'Wanda kidnapped him, thinking she’d caught a ghost for me, but I’ve seen his files. He abandoned his programme before; I need unity, harmony, synchronization. I don’t need the discordancy of mankind. I don’t need a man sliced to be a robot; I need machines that can outlive man. Outperform. _Outdo_.' He gestured proudly over the sea of machines plugging away. Her heart pounded and she kept the fear off her face.

 

'I think a lot about meteors, the purity of them,' he mused. 'Boom! The end: start again. The world made clean for the new man to rebuild.' She personally found that idea to be nightmarish; she didn’t think a new, clean world would be clean for long. She couldn’t picture a meteor as something pure. She could only see the billions of people that would be wiped out if a big enough one hit, could only imagine the death which would precede any new world order.

 

'I was meant to be new,' Ultron told her, wistful. 'I was meant to be _beautiful_. The world would've looked to the sky and seen hope, seen mercy. Instead, they'll look up in horror because of you.' He turned to her, and she felt her heart pound, afraid. Her ribs ached in counterpoint. 'You’ve wounded me,' he promised her. 'I give you full marks for that. But, like the man said, "What doesn't kill me—' The body in front of her was ripped apart, by a larger, hulking Ultron, with red eyes and a screaming voice. '—just makes me stronger!"'

 

Natasha couldn’t control herself; she scrambled away, terrified. She hadn’t felt such a visceral fear since the first time she’d seen the Hulk; this was the same insane, unbeatable, raw fucking power. She couldn’t protect herself from this source of killing and violence anymore than she’d be able to fight off the Hulk without Bruce inside. She scrambled backwards and he slammed a cell door across ancient tracks ahead of her. Nat could barely hear Ultron move away over her pulse in her ears and her own gasping breath.

 

She noticed the ripped mechanisms in front of her, piles of innards which were unique and useful. She had the beginning of an escape plan, courtesy of a terror tactic. That calmed her more than anything; she loved being underestimated and she loved when someone else’s power move backfired. She used that thought to quell the adrenaline in her blood.

 

'Hey, Steve,' she whispered once Ultron had left the mechanics bay, her breath still heaving. ‘Steve.’ He didn’t seem to hear her. He stared blankly, unaware and farway.

 

' _Pascha_ ,' she urged, using the Russian nickname she’d plucked from his early files. He looked up like she had known he would, eyes emptier than even when she had first met him in deprogramming. She thought the nickname had been the first one he’d gotten after they’d stripped away his own name; even the people stripping away his identity and autonomy had needed something to call him. When he began to come back to himself, that part of his life was always the first to emerge.

 

 _'I need you to roll me that pie_ ce,' she ordered, pointing. His gaze fell to it slowly. His foot moved out, kicking the piece towards her with precision despite his barely-responsive gaze. It rolled under their bars and she grabbed it, stripping the piece she needed from the rest of the metal. ' _Pascha, how are you today_ ?' He didn’t reply. ‘ _Can you let me know you’re all right_?' she asked, mimicking the language that the therapists she shadowed used. It was starting to feel like her own, this language of empathy.

 

'I remember new things,' he told her, his voice soft and in his native tongue. She hoped that was a good sign. 'It came back; she—I remember a lot, so much more,' he said again, dimly.

 

'I’m sorry,' she said, sincerely, because she was missing time too and was glad as hell she didn’t have to remember every hellish thing she had done. She was sad for him to have lost that ignorance. It was far from bliss—there could never be any doubt about the nature of the missing time; it was filled with evil tasks wiped away to preserve the chaos they left behind—but it was better than knowing.

 

''S OK,' he said, staring absently at his still-outstretched foot. His lips were held tight, but he didn’t try to shake his head hard enough to concuss him; he’d moved past that tic at least, or maybe she had missed that stage of the newfound memory. 'It’s not all bad; it’s just—a lot. It hurts.'

 

'I’m sending Clint an SOS,' she murmured, unable to do anything for the pain. He hadn’t accepted drugs in deprogramming, even asthma drugs until an emergency inhaler administered against his will made him look like he’d met God himself in an albuterol bottle as his lungs loosened and he suddenly could move air. Even if she had something for psychic pain, he wouldn’t take it. She’d worry about how long he’d been missing without his inhalers if she hadn’t watched in Tony’s workroom Bruce install emergency asthma drugs into the metal arm; they would last days without inhaler relief. 'I’m sure he’s cast his nets by now.'

 

'I’ll break the door open when you’re done,' Steve promised absently. 'We’ll disable the manufacturing and get out.'

 

'What is he building?' she asked, ticking Morse into her tiny telegraph machine, which may or may not manage to send out to Clint in New York; she would let Steve believe she knew what she was doing until the moment she was sure she didn’t. He was barely holding it together, it seemed. Perhaps he was holding it together, but he was frozen by memory. She only vaguely knew what that was like. She had to be the strong one and get him out of here.

 

'Drones, mostly,' Steve replied. 'He drilled into the earth to do something awful; if we can disable whatever that is without him realizing, I’m sure we’d save the people of Sokovia a lot of death.'

 

'He's making a meteor,' Nat said. Steve apparently hadn't heard Ultron ranting just now, had been trapped in his own head. 'He’s going to drop it on the Earth to kill most of mankind.'

 

'We’ll have to figure out how to disable it,' Steve repeated, unfazed by the plan.

 

'We’ll try,' she offered, but escape was her priority. He glared at her.

 

' _I’ll_ succeed,' he snapped, suddenly seeming very lucid and angry. 'He’s going to break the city apart with it. The _city_ , Nat, not an abandoned HYDRA base. Those civilians are more important than me getting out of here alive. If you want to go, go start an evacuation.' She wasn’t sure how his former rank as a medical-then-covert private compared to her former rank as a level six agent, but he’d never given her an order before. Something in his tone made her own mind urge her to follow it. She raised a brow, challenging him.

 

'Bucky wouldn’t think so,' Natasha said, ticking out her SOS again for good measure. Steve scoffed, looking back at the drones.

 

 _'Yes, he would_ ,' he said. ' _He’d be unable to admit it if I’m dead, but he knows_.'

 

'This isn’t gonna be the end for us,' she told him, lying thru her teeth but desperately hoping she was right. He didn’t say anything, just stood and braced his metal shoulder and palm between two of the old, ancient bars between them. She watched as he pushed and the bars bent between the unnatural strength of his tiny body. She stepped thru into his cell and he simply grabbed the frame of the cell door in his own hand, the first bar by the heavy, sturdy padlock and wrenched. The door popped open with a metallic crack.

 

He stepped back, holding the metal bars open for her like it were a door to a diner. Nat stepped thru, wishing she had a weapon. She felt exposed here, but if Ultron were truly, in some sick, unlikely way, lonely, she doubted he would kill her, just lock her in the undamaged cell as a captive companion. He might kill Steve. She wondered if he had only kept Steve, useless to him, to monologue to an unresponsive recipient.

 

Nat scoured the room for weapons, prying open crates and searching the few cabinets. Steve set about destroying manufacturing equipment. He broke the steel autobots constructing drones slowly, warping joints and snapping arms. Something occurred to her and she called out to him in nearly a whisper. Her Russian carried thru the room lightly in the ever-growing silence as he disabled machine after machine.

 

'If you could break the bars, why did you stay?'

 

Steve looked over at her. He frowned as he looked away, considering. He snapped another manufacturer at the base while he thought, slowly stressing the metal to break.

 

'When Wanda was here, I couldn’t,' he said. Another piece snapped under his hands. 'The new memories disoriented me. By the time I realised she was gone, you were here,' he added, sincerely. 'I had to wait for you to wake up.'

 

'Pascha, are you sure of who you are?' she asked, because if he weren't, he would be a liability. He looked at her again, holding her gaze this time.

 

'My name is Steve Rogers,' he promised. 'I’m going to save this city, and then I’m going to go home.'

 

^^^

 

Bucky held onto a grab bar as Clint piloted them back to Sokovia. The evacuation of the city was already underway; Bucky had called his Sokovian contact in the DC consulate and they’d believed him when he said there was a shitstorm coming. They’d had the evacuation plan already in motion when he'd called. He didn’t feel any more prepared for it; Steve was somewhere in Ultron’s base and, for all Bucky knew, he was dead. For all they knew, Nat had been killed—but Steve couldn’t have been killed; he just couldn’t have—if Ultron found out she’d sent Clint an SOS. With that uncertainty, and with everything that had shook Bucky in the last few days, he felt very unprepared.

 

'Ten minutes out,' Clint reported, turning his head to look at Bucky. Bucky gave him a nod. He sighed, turning to his team.

 

'Ultron knows we're coming,' he reminded them. 'We’re headed into a mess, a partially-evacuated city with an unknown number of civilians. This is our fight, more than most; two of our own started it. The people of Sokovia have no place in it, and now there’s a target on their backs. Our priority is to hold off truly engaging Ultron until we can get them all out. Until Ultron hits, and he’ll hit hard, we’ll do everything we can to get them out of this.'

 

'We get the people out. We find Nat, and we find Steve, and we keep the fight between us,' he said. That had been his strategy when they had fought Loki, and they’d seen seventy eight civilian deaths. He wanted to see fewer this time around. He wanted that so fucking badly and he had no idea how to make it happen, not with an enemy so extraordinary. 'Ultron thinks the only way to achieve peace is to remove us from the equation. He might destroy the planet in doing so, but this isn't just about stopping that. It's about whether or not he's right.'

 

Sometimes Bucky wondered if the world would be a more peaceful place without them, if their mere presence was enough to inspire extraordinary evil. He wondered if the world wouldn’t be better off without him. He didn’t know if he had a place to exist in anymore. He didn’t know if he could exist without hurting things.

 

‘Vision,’ he began, uncomfortable with the creature but absolutely not showing it. ‘You’re going to scan buildings, find people who haven’t evacuated and tell them they need to get out. Start at the church and move outwards. Doctor Banner,' he continued, wishing the next assignment could be his. He had to be on the ground; the Captain couldn’t be the one most removed from the place where the fight would happen. Bruce could and maybe should be as far away from things, until they knew how well the evacuation had gone, where their defensive perimeter would be. They didn’t know where the Hulk would be a help to them and not a danger to evacuees. 'You’re going to infiltrate the base, find our missing members. If they’re injured, get them to medevac. If they’re not, tell them to suit up.'

 

'The twins are going to coordinate the evacuation in conjunction with Sokovian authorities,' Bucky went on. 'City buses and most of the charters have been contacted already; they’re waiting thruout the city for loading. We don’t want gridlock with thousands of private cars; we want people to get out and quickly. Pietro will help the police and Wanda will— _encourage_ —civilians who aren’t taking the need to get out seriously.' She nodded easily.

 

He didn’t like the idea of using her enhancement like this; it felt incredibly wrong to ask her to control people, no matter how he couched it with euphemism. He liked the idea of stubborn or ignorant civilians being slaughtered even less. He didn’t know if it was right, but he couldn’t live with many more dead innocents in his ledge. 

 

'Clint and I will help where we can,’ he went on, ‘and we’ll decide where to establish LEO perimeters once we know the layout on the ground. The moment we know where Ultron is going to strike from, we’ll assume defensive positions around the populace.’

 

‘Tony, if anyone can keep a perverted version of yourself captivated, it’s you,’ Bucky said. He had expected to see Tony grin, even a forced grin, but Tony offered him nothing but a somber face. Bucky gave orders, then, as Captain. ‘Find Ultron. Stall. We need as much time as possible to get as many people out as possible.’

 

'Eventually, it’ll be a fight,' Tony said. 'No way we all get through this. If even one tin soldier is left standing, we've lost. It's gonna be blood on the floor.'

 

'Well, we’re the Avengers,' Bucky said uselessly. 'If you get hit, hit back harder. If you get killed, walk it off.' Wanda grinned, naively optimistic. Bucky didn’t have a good feeling. They would see blood on the floor. They might have already seen it; Steve and Nat could already be dead. A plucky _walk it off_ was one thing; the actual body of a teammate was another.

 

'I take Ultron’s threat very seriously,' Bucky went on. 'I don’t care if we level the city. We are getting as many people out as is possible. Not humanly possible, but _possible_. We are above and beyond; all of you know that. I trust my team,' he added, knowing the plan was vague. 'I trust that you guys can minimize civilian deaths. I trust that we can beat Ultron. We are going to beat him. I know we can.'

 

The quinjet began lowering just outside the city, safely away from the busy roads full of evacuating cars. Bucky’s heart fell into his stomach as they began their descent; he could barely breathe until he felt the telltale bump of landing gear on the ground. He wondered if that fear would ever go away.

 

'OK,' he said uselessly as the back hatch opened. 'Let’s tear Ultron apart.'

 

^^^

 

Wanda’s hometown had robots raining from the sky. Ultron was going to destroy the entire planet in a fiery inferno—she’d seen it—and he was going to start with their home. She gasped as a formation of flying bots swooped overhead. She used her fire to bat their plasma blasts away from the others. She realised the fire could form a wall and she could create her own shield, like Captain America’s. She deflected a blast right back to the bot that fired it. She tried to do the same with the next blast; she missed. A streetlight exploded into sparks and shrapnel; its pole fell and smashed into a windshield.

 

Pietro was still in the city; she could feel his heart racing faster than a hummingbird’s, next to her heart, a phantom muscle in her chest. She knew he was helping with the evacuation. Wanda knew Pietro had to protect everyone, not just her, but God, if the fight SHIELD had always told them they were built for wasn’t much scarier without her brother by her side.

 

'Cap, you got incoming!' Stark shouted in her ear. Something exploded by Pietro and sharped fear across his chest; she felt him stop too suddenly before moving in a new direction, far away from her. They hadn’t known war was like this. They hadn’t known that war was different when you were the one supposed to be fighting. Before, when they’d lived through violence in these streets, they’d cowered in crumbling buildings with their parents. Their parents had been killed by a war like this. The only difference was, now they were in the thick of it. She ripped another robot apart, sending the repulsors careening into one of its siblings.

 

'Incoming already came,' Captain America said, voice strained. Wanda did not know his mind well enough to see if he were all right; she deflected more plasma, from an empty city bus, which they might need if stragglers did indeed appear in the area she’d been ordered to sweep. 'Iron Man, figure out what the fuck that earthquake was; find out what caused it, and if it’s loading for another shot.'

 

'Roger that,' Stark’s voice chirped.

 

'The rest of us have two jobs: tear these things apart,' Captain America ordered. 'There are a few civilians still in the city: if you see one, cover them; get them to the LEO perimeter; come back and cover your teammates.'

 

A new wave of bots appeared, clawing and flying and breaking apart the ancient buildings of the Old Town. Wanda screamed, her hands flinging over her head, her fire stopping the debris that flew at her. Someone grabbed her arm. For a brief second, she hoped it was her brother, come to take them away from all of this, to take them to run.

 

'Go!' shouted the man who’d nearly shot Pietro. Despite herself, she trusted him. She followed his pull. 'Go, move!' They burst thru old, wooden doors, crouching by the boarded wall of what decades ago was a stable and was now a general shop’s storeroom. Wanda had bought almond cookies at this store during Easter when she was almost too small to remember; she and her brother had taken one for their mother too.

 

'How—How could I let this happen?' she whispered. She could see into people’s heads; she should have known how badly this would go. She shouldn’t have let revenge— _Revenge_! How _selfish_!—to cloud their minds. She should have made Pietro understand when she first realized they should leave Ultron. She should have done better; she should have—

 

'Hey,' Barton called. 'Hey, you OK?'

 

'This is all our fault,' she told him. Her voice was wetter than it had been since she and Pietro’s change was finished.

 

'Hey, look at me,' Barton said. Wanda felt her eyes draw up without her permission; the English was new and foreign, but she knew that tone of voice. She knew his tone. Her father had spoken like that. It was concern, she realised. That was what had been in Captain America’s voice too. It was what the Winter Soldier had shown them in the midfields of Wakanda. The Winter Soldier, a ghost, had spoken with concern and compassion and she had torn him to pieces.

 

'It’s your fault; it’s everyone’s fault; who cares?' Barton said. 'Are you up for this? Are you?' Wanda stared. 'Look, I just need to know, 'cause there’s been an earthquake where that is definitely not supposed to happen and we’re fighting an army of robots. OK, look, the ground is shaking, we’re fighting robots, and I have a bow and arrow. None of this makes any sense.'

 

She shook her head; it didn’t make sense. They’d only wanted Stark to pay for killing their family and for the bomb that had taunted them for so long; they hadn’t wanted to create this. They hadn’t meant to break everything apart but the ground had surged and shattered. Bridges were falling and without them the rivers would trap them where Ultron could reach.

 

'OK?' Barton asked. 'But I'm going to go back out there because this is my job.' She nodded, desperately. She could feel her hands clutching wood where he’d pulled her to crouch behind supplies and crates of lemons. 'OK? and I can't do my job and babysit. It doesn't matter what you did, or what you were. If you go out there, you fight, and you fight to kill.' She didn’t know if she could.

 

'Look, y’stay in here, you're good,' he promised her. 'I’ll send your brother to come find you, but if you step out that door, you are an Avenger.' He looked at her, patient and waiting. She couldn’t force words from her throat. He nodded, unbothered, nonjudgemental, even after she’d tried in that ship to rip his mind apart like she had everyone else’s. 'Alright,' he said brightly. 'Good chat.'

 

He readied his bows. He blew a hard breath to himself, steadying himself with bright thoughts of children and a woman who warmed him like the sun; she stared at him, amazed that the fear of leaving them was what he used to soothe his shaken hands. She couldn’t believe he could gather strength from something delicate, something breakable. They were all so breakable.

 

'Thor, the west bridge is collapsing; there are some civilian vehicles—' the Captain’s voice cut out from the coms, as something went wrong or Thor appeared at his aide. She could imagine the chaos, the flying robots, the ones slicing their way up and out of the bottom of the creeks and rivers, the shattering windows and the screams of fear from civilians still in the outskirts of the city. They needed a perimeter. They needed a perimeter; the Captain had said that, but how were the police supposed to stop the flying machines? How were they supposed to face this evil Stark had created? It was too much for them.

 

It wouldn’t be too much for her. She’d broken Stark in this city; she’d shown him the real meaning of fear. She could do the same to these machines. She could destroy them as much as she could destroy anything. She breathed deeply. She could do this. Wanda burst out; overhead bots spotted her immediately. She reached out, wrapping her fire around pistons and joints, wrenching, tearing, ripping the robots into pieces. Their debris rained on parked cars and the glass-strewn cobblestone.

 

She felt powerful, suddenly, and she grinned as she shredded her enemies.

 

^^^

 

'I’ve got the Hulk calming down,' Nat reported over coms. 'This wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.'

 

'Two of the city’s three bridges are out,' Bucky corrected. The hospital was along the fault line and an entire wing was destroyed. There was structural damage all over the city and there would be no guarantee of how long ’til civilians could go home, if home were still standing.

 

He didn’t know how the city would recover from this; he was never good at imagining destruction ameliorated. Gdańsk had been completely destroyed in his first war; he’d been back there when fighting HYDRA the second time, and they’d recovered. Japan had recovered too; all the bombed-out cities he’d known in Europe and North Africa had knit themselves back together. Sokovia would knit itself back together too. Besides, Ultron had wanted to rip the entire city from the ground and turn it into a meteor. Nat was right, objectively; it was not as bad as the villain had tried to make it.

 

'Where’s Steve?' he asked, forgoing codenames in his worry. The dust was literally settling. The final physical form of Ultron had been destroyed; Vision was burning him out of the Internet. They had won, but Steve was still missing. The com functions in his implant were within range of the quinjet’s relay, the weaker, secondary relay in the Captain's com system, in the relay the LEOs had set up beyond the church, whose copper-lined rotunda blocked the jet's. Bucky should have heard from him by now. He was afraid to call on Steve directly for a check in; he was afraid the silence would confirm the fear he’d held in his chest since Steve first went missing. He was afraid of hoping the silence was anything than the obvious. He was afraid if he looked for Steve himself that he’d find a body like the one he thought he’d left in the mountains all those years ago.

 

'He’s underground,' Nat said. Relief began to seep into his bones, before he realised where that meant he would have to go to look; fear cropped back up like waves over a levy. 'He wanted to disable all of Ultron’s equipment; we won so quickly because he shut down the manufacturing hours after Ultron left to prep the drill, before you got here, before I even started the evac.' Bucky hesitated, looking around at the earthquake that had shattered the city. He was so fucking thankful the evacuation had started when Nat had given the order, not when he’d contacted the consulate. So many more people had gotten out. They didn’t have to look for civilian bodies in any of the ripped blocks. They had done well.

 

'Can you hold down the fort up here, if I go down to look for him?' he asked.

 

'No, I’m concussed,' she admitted. She usually wouldn’t, so he took her word as Gospel.

 

'Captain to dispatch: I need a medevac for Black Widow,' he said.

 

'No, fuck off; don’t do that,' she said. 'I can—I’m doing things; I just shouldn’t be in charge.' He shook his head.

 

'Dispatch, I repeat: send medics to evac the Widow. She’s concussed and I don’t fuck around with brain injuries,' he said firmly, over the com, daring Nat to continue to disagree. There was a silence after dispatch confirmed medics were on their way to Widow. 'Nat?' he asked, having expected her to keep bitching.

 

'I just threw up everything I’ve ever eaten in my life,' she groaned. She sounded disoriented, artificially emotional from injury and nausea, her voice wet and cracking.

 

'Aw, Nat,' Clint said. 'You need to get out of here. Cap, I’ve got it up here. Patriot’s at the border; he’ll be another half-hour. I can hold it until the Iron Patriot arrives.' Bucky rolled his eyes at Rhodey’s codename; he hated it so much and Rhodey wouldn’t change it. Rhodey didn’t think patriotism was as dangerous as Bucky did (He supposed _Captain America_ wasn’t much better). He also supposed Rhodey hadn’t lived thru patriotism turning to nationalism turning to fascism all over the world.

 

'Captain to dispatch: refer LEOs and National Guard to Hawkeye until the Patriot arrives,' he ordered. 'Please track my signal as best you can underground; I’m searching out a potentially injured operative.'

 

'Roger that, Captain,' the woman at dispatch replied. 'The magnet is interfering with a lot of our functions; we may not be able to, but we’ll try.' The clean-up and evaluation of the earthquake damage yet to come hummed in the coms as Bucky made his way to the base.

 

Underground was _terrifying._

 

The walls were fractured beneath the base, the floor cracked and uneven by inches, held as solid a stairwell by the magnet within the drill. Bucky shivered. Eventually the magnet would need to be shut down; the city would be left to collapse or stand on its own, independent, damaged.

 

‘That’s where we split up,’ Nat said in his ear. He sighed, stopping at a three-way junction on the ancient landing.

 

‘Get out of the tracking room,’ Bucky snapped. ‘Go back to the medics who evacuated you.’

 

‘It’s fine,’ Nat said. ‘I threw up; I feel better. We keep losing your signal, so listen while I have you. Look, I went up, came after you guys. He wanted to find the vibranium and disable whatever Ultron was going to use to rip the city out of the ground.

 

‘The drill,’ Bucky supplied. He realised he’d have to walk towards the source of the destruction. He’d have to get closer to the thing that had broken the ground into new faults. He’d have to get further into the mess, into the more damaged parts of this hellish underground.

 

‘He went along the landing, thru the tunnel,’ Nat said. ‘He didn’t go down any further.’ At least, Bucky thought, looking down the narrow stairwell that descended into blackness, he wouldn’t have to go that way. It was an insufficient comfort. He wondered how intact the tunnel Steve had taken could possibly be; entire blocks of the city had looked like they had been rocked by an earthquake.

 

Ultron had wanted to launch much more than that into the sky to use as a meteor. He had to remember that. He had to remember how much worse it could have been, if Ultron’s second wave of fighters had been built as the robot expected them. Bucky imagined, from Ultron’s rage when he realised he’d been sabotaged by his own prisoners, that they might not have held the church for as long as they had if the second wave had come.

 

Bucky had seen the manufacturing chamber already; Steve had broken as many moving parts as he could reach and then stripped wiring from control boxes and let coolant drain from heat exchangers. The helium tank had been still hissing when Bucky had hurried thru. Steve had saved them there too, not just by keeping the city grounded however he had.

 

Bucky couldn’t fathom walking down the dark tunnel, along the broken floor, under fractured ceilings that could bury him at any moment, like he’d been buried in New Jersey when SHIELD had tried to blow him off the face of the earth. He had prayed then. He was too petrified now to even think of the words. He stepped, moving forward. It was so dark in the tunnel, nearly pitch black, and it would only get darker as he moved closer to the weapon Steve had stopped. Steve had to be at the end of this tunnel; he had to be and he had to be all right.

 

He could see in the dark, a gift of the serum, but that didn't stop him from hesitating, afraid. Maybe the stairwell would have been better. This tunnel had to be worse than the stairs might have been; nothing could be worse than this tunnel. What if Steve had escaped somehow? What if Bucky were walking towards nothing, thru the terror of a trapping passageway for nothing?

 

‘Steve?’ he shouted aimlessly, hoping. He could hear his shout echo along the tunnel, travelling and returning to him in the silence. He cupped his hands over his mouth. ‘Steve!’

 

A whistle came back, weak but sharp. Bucky’s hands started shaking.

 

‘What the fuck,’ he whispered.

 

‘What is it?’ Nat asked, her voice crackling and staticky.

 

‘It’s dark; that’s all,’ Bucky said, lying. The whistle came again, drifting like sinister birdsong as it echoed along the round walls. ‘I’m in the tunnel now.’ The channel offered nothing but a crackle in reply and Bucky hoped they hadn’t lost him. He hoped he wasn’t alone as he stepped up along the faulted floor, up towards the drill, along what had been flat and secure and was now broken and ready to fall, to crush him, to trap him at any time.

 

He kept his hand on the wall as he moved, sweating cold in his glove, feeling how the stone bricks wouldn’t shift under his hand. They were steady, just like the rest of the city. Rescue workers were searching buildings which wouldn’t collapse while the magnet held them; Bucky was going to get out the same way he came in. The magnet would keep his escape route open. Bucky had to keep calm.

 

The whistle sounded again, fractionally closer, and Bucky shouted.

 

‘Steve? Is that you?’ The whistler replied, an aimless tune. Bucky could feel every muscle of his heart pounding in his chest. It was so fucking creepy, the air rotten and sour with stagnancy; it was _awful_ down here. He gasped, filling his lungs with enough mephitic air to shout again. ‘Steve!’

 

He got nothing but a whistle, and it scared him so deeply to realize it was closer now, just around the next bend, or the next jagged, horrific rise in the floor. He wondered if it were a trap.

 

It couldn’t be a trap. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t be trapped down here. He would die of fear alone if he got himself trapped down here and then Steve would die because Bucky wouldn’t find him; Bucky would let him down again.

 

‘Jesus Christ,’ he cursed, stumbling to a sudden stop, looking at the disruption of the tunnel. It was worse suddenly, three ledges rising up and the floor beyond that sloping. Bucky didn't want to go up there; it would fall underneath his weight and he would surely fall into Hell.

 

‘Captain: status?’ The signal on his com crackled, coming alive suddenly enough to make Bucky flinch, enough to stun his breathing for a moment. He gasped, doubling to get his hands on his knees. He tried to slow his breathing and still his beating heart. He tried to calm down. He couldn’t get out; he had to find _Steve_ ; he had to _find_ Steve; this whistle had to be Steve asking for help; it had to be him; he had to be alive; they had to be alive and they had to get out of here together.

 

‘I have to be close to the church,’ he reported, because the only way for the floor of the tunnel to be broken and jagged and lifted like this was if it had lifted with the rest of the broken parts of the city.

 

The whistle drifted, cutting itself off the small lilt Bucky had come to expect.

 

‘I’ve found where he is; I can’t be far away,’ Bucky said, arrogating. It had to be Steve; he had to be the one at the end of this fucking tunnel, not something worse; it couldn’t be. Bucky couldn't handle it. ‘It’s, just, the earthquake damage. The tunnel could collapse so easily,’ he said.

 

‘I don’t want to wait to find another way to Steve,’ Nat said, piping in on the channel. He could barely hear her, even when his ears usually picked up the com volume as almost uncomfortably loud. ‘Wanda was in his head. Can you do this?’

 

He sighed even tho he felt like gasping, looking into the fractured tunnel. This was dangerous, but she was right; their other option was to find another way to Steve. He'd been trapped underground with Nat before. He'd dug them out then but he hadn't been sure until he felt fresh air that his next movement wouldn’t bring debris down and crush them for real. He didn’t look forward to creeping along a damaged structure again.

 

He'd be wasting time if the whistler weren't Steve. There was no guarantee that it was Steve but for the fact Steve simply had to be down here; it was the last place anyone knew he was going and he just had to be here still.

 

‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘Let’s be really fucking careful.’ He waited for the expected _copy that_ but received nothing. He touched his com, hoping.

 

‘Dispatch: Captain to tracking?’ he tried, setting himself back to the main frequency. He didn't even get static in return. ‘Fuck,’ he whispered. ‘ _Fuck_.’

 

The ancient stone bricks seemed to be holding, even when they’d been torn from their neighbours and lifted several feet. The floor of the tunnel had snapped and broken into steps and Bucky had to hoist his hips up and over three ledges as he descended into the mouth of the whale, unwilling to hop and land his weight.

 

Whoever it was kept whistling every few minutes, letting him know how close, how close, how close he was. Bucky passed thru a miraculously intact archway and in the center of the room was a vibranium drill, a couple feet across, running from the domed, earth ceiling and into the ground.

 

‘Holy shit,’ Bucky said, spotting Steve’s legs from behind the vibranium. ‘Steve!’ He ran, rounding the drill and sliding along the floor for a second when he dropped to his knees in his rush. ‘Stevie, Stevie, how you doing, pal, huh?’

 

Steve tried to talk, tried to lift his head from the metal. He was up to his shoulder in the drill shaft, Bucky realised. His entire prosthetic was caught.

 

Bucky grabbed Steve’s face, mindless of the soot and concrete dust his battle gloves left behind. His knees began to soak; he realized Steve had ripped the coolant hose and had been left to sit in the wet. Even with the soaked clothes, Steve’s skin was tacky with sweat; Bucky left a smear of grime behind. He lifted, against some sort of resistance, hesitance maybe. Steve gasped; his eyes went wild as Bucky moved his head. His nose was streaming red and something clear was leaking slowly out of his left ear. Bucky panicked, pushing Steve’s hair out of his face.

 

‘Are you OK?’ he demanded, perhaps too fiercely. Steve nodded desperately, mostly a blink, barely moving beneath Bucky’s searching, checking hands. ‘OK,’ Bucky said, relieved. ‘OK; you’re OK.’

 

‘I was—I was—I was trying to get to the feed motor and the bauer pin,’ Steve said, his voice tight and sharp, almost reedy. ‘And I was—I was going to displace the auger blade so—the drill couldn’t—’ His explanation stuck in his throat. The sweat on his forehead was beading.

 

‘And it turned on, huh?’ Bucky guessed, stroking his hand over Steve’s hair. Steve nodded again, that same small movement. Bucky bit his lip. They should’ve held the church longer. The city would have been better off; the drill might’ve been really disabled; Steve might’ve gotten out and to the surface. They wouldn’t be trapped with only a damaged tunnel as an obvious out. The arm being crushed wasn’t Steve’s, and if it were crushed, it shouldn’t deliver any sensation.

 

All the same, Steve was sweating with pain; he was pale and his human knuckles were white where they were fisted against Bucky’s knee.

 

‘What’s hurting? Do I need to turn off the arm? Isn’t it completely crushed; how can you feel it? What can I do, huh, Stevie?’ Bucky asked, babbling when Steve tried to speak. ‘Come on,’ he prompted, when Steve tried to shake his head. Bucky felt the attempt more than he saw the movement.

 

‘It’s—the magnet—’ Steve tried. He couldn’t take a full breath. Bucky realised why he hadn’t been able to shout back. He was pinned to sharply to shout so he’d whistled. Bucky almost floated away on the relief that he wasn’t trapped by some sound he’d followed, desperate as a fool in love. Steve was _alive_. ‘Some of my skeleton isn’t mine anymore.’

 

‘Oh, my God, it’s pulling at the metal,’ he realized. Steve nodded again, that bare, tight movement. Bucky touched his com, connecting his mic, praying. ‘Iron Man, this is the Captain; come in.’

 

‘D’you find Shortstop?’ Tony asked immediately. The signal crackled over the distance of rock between Tony and Buck. He came in tho, louder than Nat had outside the drill chamber and clearer than dispatch; he had to be closer to Bucky. Bucky thanked God.

 

‘It’s lousy down here; Shortstop’s trapped by the drill,’ Bucky said. ‘Can you disable—shut down the magnet?’

 

There was a silence. Bucky prayed he hadn’t lost the signal again. He prayed he hadn’t lost Tony. He couldn’t get Steve out alone.

 

Steve unwound his tight fist, reaching out shakily. Bucky took the offered hand, letting Steve squeeze as tight as he needed to. He kept holding Steve’s head up. He realised the resistance he felt had been the metal hearing aid in Steve’s skull resisting distance from the magnet. He ignored the twist of his stomach and put his hand over it, trying to shield Steve from something at least. He realised he felt the vibranium magnet, atypical in its magnetic field, pulling at the shield on his back, confusing the rare earth-magnetic relays on his arm and shoulder holster. It was faint, but he could feel it. He wondered why Steve was pinned and the rock was solid when his holster was stronger than the magnet, when street signs and metal poles hadn’t been ripped to the ground and folded flat. He wondered what the hell made the vibranium magnet work the way it did; he wondered if something had gone worse if Steve’s skeleton might have torn him to ribbons.

 

He didn't understand why Tony had done this, had built this awful thing.

 

‘Captain America to Iron Man: come in?’ Bucky tried.

 

A static signal promised him hope: ‘Cap? Ten-one?’ Bucky understood, past the halting and static. He covered his com with a hand, leaning from the magnet best he could without leaving Steve. He called again, repeating his message and plea out loud, repeating his prayer in his head afterwards. Steve tried to say something and Bucky shushed him.

 

‘We’re gonna get you outta here; don’t sweat it, darling, please,’ Bucky begged, before calling in his own ten-code. ‘Ten-seven-eight, Iron Man. Ten-seventy-eight.

 

‘Ten-two, Cap; I fixed it,’ Tony declared, something changing and improving the signal. Bucky dropped both his hands back to Steve. ‘We got your signal; ten-nine.’

 

‘I repeat: _ten-seven-eight_ : can you shut down the magnet to facilitate medevac of Shortstop?’ There was a pause. Bucky swore he could hear Tony thinking but he also thought silence might mean death for them, underground like this. ‘Iron Man, come in?’

 

‘The magnet’s holding the city together,’ Tony said regretfully, managing. ‘I guess Steve stopped the drill from getting as deep as it might have; Ultron wanted the whole city and he only got about eight square blocks, but the underground faults are more extensive than we thought. We’re using it to keep debris from—’ Bucky realised that the reason the impossibly broken tunnel hadn’t crushed him on his way in was because Steve was crushed against and within the mechanism which was holding the broken earth steady. Steve’s disruption of the drill’s system was the only thing that had stopped it from ripping the entire city rom the Earth. He realised he didn’t know how to get them out. To get Steve away from the magnet, it seemed like they needed to turn it off, but that would let rocks fall and maybe the entire chamber would collapse. He didn’t know what to do.

 

‘OK, well, he’s fucking pinned like a butterfly down here so—’ Bucky snapped, panicking despite himself.

 

‘I’ll see what I can do, all right?’ Tony said, placating but not condescending in his tone. ‘I’ll get back; give me ten—gimme maybe fifteen minutes and then I’ll come see what’s what down there, OK?’ Bucky wanted to barter, get Tony to move quicker, but there was no point. The structure of dozens of buildings—civilian residences, businesses, even a school, the disused church, huge markets, a small but vibrant Roma community on the outskirts of the downtown, between the east creeks and the city’s forest—depended on the magnet. Bucky understood that but it didn’t ease the terrorized fist around his heart.

 

‘OK,’ he agreed. ‘OK, call me in when you have an update,’ Bucky said.

 

‘Aye, aye,’ Tony chimed. Bucky muted his microphone, keeping the radio relays active in his ear. Voices bounced in the background. His worry tuned them out for him.

 

‘Should I—What can I do?’ he said aloud, trying to hold Steve’s eyes and not keep glancing at the tunnel: it was still standing, still standing, still standing. ‘Steve, what can I do?

 

Steve’s prosthetic was crushed; he wouldn’t bleed to death or stop breathing if he had to wait an unbearable time. It had already been hours since the drill had been activated. Bucky knew that; he did. He took Steve’s hand again, wanting to lift it to his mouth but afraid of tugging at the magnetic restraints Zola had welded into Steve’s shoulder joints.

 

‘’S OK,’ Steve managed, even as his eyes closed, pained. ‘I’m all right. I can take it.’ Bucky looked up the tunnel.

 

Bucky felt sick deep, deep in his stomach to imagine Steve’s skeleton being so artificial as to be pulled by a vibranium magnet. He kept his other hand tucked against the metal in Steve’s skull. He didn’t know if it helped but he didn’t want to let go.

 

‘How are we gonna get out of here, Stevie?’ he whispered. Steve forced his eyes open, searching Bucky immediately. They were trapped, but Bucky regretted saying anything; it was his job to be the strong one; he was supposed to be looking out for Steve; he told Sarah he would; he was _Captain America_ , for God’s sakes—

 

‘Hey,’ Steve said, shaking their joined hands best he could, trying to get Bucky’s attention. ‘Hey, we’re gonna be fine.’ They were _trapped_.

 

‘No, we’re _underground_ , and if the magnet shuts down, it all crumbles, Stevie,’ Bucky gasped. ‘Holy shit.’ They were fucking _trapped; they were trapped_. He couldn’t afford to be freaking out right now, but they had to disarm the drill to get Steve out—Steve was caught when it turned on, so how the fuck else could they do it; factor in the magnet, _Jesus_ —and then the tunnel would collapse and they’d be trapped; they’d be trapped like he’d been trapped in the Valkyrie as it filled with water, as slush poured in, as his lungs froze—It had been less than fifty feet of water over him when he’d drowned; it had been impossible to tell how much water once it turned to ice. He’d been trapped and he was about to be trapped again; he couldn’t even get out before things went wrong. He had to stay; he had to hold Steve.

 

‘Sh,’ Steve said, trying to tug Bucky closer to him, to force Bucky along Steve’ side, to force him to hide the way he wanted to.

 

‘We’re fucking trapped,’ Bucky whispered. He didn’t move closer. He held Steve’s hand tightly. He was terrified that if he moved closer somehow the magnet would get him too and then he’d be stuck and trapped and crushed, like Steve. Steve could take it but he couldn’t. He couldn’t stand it.

 

‘Why did you come down here?’ Steve whispered. ‘You should’ve sent somebody else.’

 

‘I had to come get you,’ Bucky told him. ‘I couldn’t let someone else come find you. What if you were dead and it was the second time I didn’t bother to look for your body?’

 

‘Hey, no,’ Steve gasped. Bucky had to get it together. Steve was the one who was trapped. He was letting his head get the better of him. ‘You get scared when you can’t get out easy; you should _know_ better; you get scared—’

 

He didn’t understand how Steve could say things like that so easily. Steve used to be the most pigheaded, insensitive asshole, and Bucky was only a little bit better now. They used to have whispered shouting matches, fighting under a neighbour’s loud radio or a colicky baby. They used to rail at each other instead of speaking in these considered little sentences. Bucky hated that he could hear, in every intentional statement Steve said about _feeling_ , the measured approach he needed to take to access that part of his brain at all. He hated that he was so weak that Steve was right; he got scared easy and he wasn’t the right guy for this job. He shouldn’t have come down here, because now they were fucking trapped.

 

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Bucky snapped. ‘It’s just—What if I wasn’t the one looking for your body?’

 

‘OK,’ Steve said. ‘OK, but I’m not dead.’

 

‘No,’ Bucky agreed. Relief flooded him, like he hadn’t noticed that until now. They weren’t dead. They weren’t dead; they would get out of here one way or another. ‘No; no, we’re fine.’

 

‘We’re gonna get out,’ Steve told him. ‘Tony’s gonna get me out; it’s not gonna hurt forever.’

 

‘We’re OK,’ Bucky said. ‘We’ll get out. It’ll be OK.’

 

‘I’m gonna need a new arm,’ Steve put in. He was clearly trying to distract Bucky, for all his face was beading with sweat and Bucky could feel him shaking too.

 

‘We’ll get you a nice one,’ Bucky promised aimlessly. He wanted to be above ground so badly he could barely think. He pressed his lips to Steve’s forehead, daring to move that close to the trap, to the magnet. He wanted to aboveground so badly. ‘We’ll get you something real nice.’

 

^^^

 

Bucky almost couldn’t stand the nervous beating of his own traitorous heart anymore. How dare it beat like this, fluttering and skipping a beat everytime Steve let out a noise or someone murmured a bad prognosis where he could hear it. Bucky hated that he was hovering over the rescue crew Tony had brought like this. He hated it more since he’d abandoned Steve when they first arrived to nervously vomit in a fault-created alcove of the tunnel; he just hadn’t been able to take the trap of being underground anymore.

 

He couldn’t take it. He would die. He had to stay and see Steve out of here; he would stay and see Steve out of here. He also just felt like it would kill him to do it.

 

Bucky sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his fingers; his filthy gloves were long since tucked into his belt, not into any of the little pouches filled with little gadgets he’d figured out only half of. He tried to ignore the pull of his worry to Steve, just the drill’s magnetic pull still licking at his shield and its harnesses.

 

‘What’s coming out of his ears? Why’s his nose bleeding?’ Bucky asked no one in particular, hovering closer than the EMTs and Tony had told him he could stand. Tony sighed, in that way he did when he focused some energy to explain something while his mind moved a mile a moment on something else.

 

‘It’s why I updated the arm instead of giving him an adapted version of the civilian model,’ Tony said. ‘I mean, the thing weighs a million times more than what I make; the metal cuts stuff; it would have been nicer for Steve.’

 

‘It’s just the way it’s installed,’ Tony hedged. ‘It’s integrated into his nervous system, like a real arm. This isn’t a temporary prosthetic. The port on the civilian model isn’t removeable even. Getting it removed—especially like this—ripped out some important connections.’

 

‘How does ripping apart this lump of metal and fucking wires make him _bleed_ —’ Bucky snapped.

 

‘I do not understand how you’re not understanding this right now,’ Tony said, snapping right back. ‘Dad said you used to fix radios and shit during the war; imagine I cut the radio in half and part of that half was attached to his _brain_ —’ Tony began, turning to eye Bucky and turning his tone sarcastic.

 

‘ _Radios_ have _vacuum_ tubes and _dynamotors_!’ Bucky said. He realised he and Tony were nearly shouting, nearly full-volume, and he reigned himself in. He was not going to shout underground. He was not going to lose his cool and the ceiling would not crumble to make them all die. He was not going to throw up again, especially not now that there were so many people down here—he didn't know if it were _safe_ to have this many people down here, so he had to calm down.

 

‘This is all just more complicated. I didn't mean to shout; I’m just a little frazzled right now, Tony,’ he said, too honest. He had to be too honest, if he wanted to let the smoke out and let the fire die. He couldn’t afford to be angry; he was worried about Steve and that combined with being terrified would be enough to wipe him out.

 

‘Yeah, and his arm’s gone; we replaced it with this, and his implant’s being pulled around, too, so,’ Tony said, smug, like he thought he’d somehow won. Bucky closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see Steve and hold his temper at the same time. He wondered how he had ever doubted Steve when he would shake his head mournfully, bleeding like a fool and having wrecked another set of clothes more than Buck could reasonably fix and still call decent. Bucky used to scoff and laugh when Steve would confess that he’d _just lost it_. He used to say it like that was enough, to have simply been so angry that he needed to pick a fight. Bucky was hurting but it was nothing compared to Steve then or now; he had no excuse and he was so close to just _losing_ it, losing his temper and never reigning himself back in. ‘His brain is bleeding.’

 

‘His ears aren’t bleeding,’ Bucky said, even as the red smears down Steve’s chin and neck seemed more vicious now.

 

‘It’s spinal fluid,’ the EMT said casually. Bucky almost threw up again, without even enough warning to get outside, into the tunnel, into something like privacy. ‘Lemme see your pupils, hun,’ the EMT said, touching Steve’s face. He struggled to open his eyes for her, still unfocused and shaking. ‘Uneven pupil response,’ she reported, dimming the penlight she’d swiped across Steve’s field of vision. ‘Can you see, hun?’

 

‘Um, colours,’ Steve said. ‘Shapes. I can’t—I don’t know.’ She cooed a reassurance, giving his hair a pat as she peered her light up into the drill where Steve was caught.

 

‘Jesus,’ Bucky murmured.

 

‘’M OK,’ Steve said just as quietly, exhausted and still fucking pinned against and within the drill shaft. He sounded barely there, like a balloon with only a thread of ribbon holding it to someone’s wrist. His eyes fell shut.

 

‘OK, I’m starting to think,’ Tony said, before cutting himself off. He looked at the EMT next to him, who shrugged as if she had the same idea in her head. They both glanced up at him, cautious with merely the idea, then back at Steve. Steve had to get out of there, more than any of them, more than Bucky even.

 

‘What is it?’ Bucky pressed. ‘Think what?’

 

‘We can’t turn the magnet off, not til we figure out how to not destroy the city,’ Tony said. ‘The arm—the _prosthetic_ , I mean, it’s caught in the auger blade and the wall of the drill shaft, which could take ages to sort out. Steve is not necessarily stuck; the arm _is_ necessarily stuck. The prosthetic, I mean—’

 

‘We have to get him out of here,’ Bucky said, brusque, unable to bite back his words.

 

‘I _know_ that, Bucky,’ Tony replied slowly. ‘That’s why I think we should just—I think we should saw the _arm_ off here,’ Tony said, now speaking to the EMT, who leaned in to see what he was showing her just inside the drill shaft. ‘That plate on the prosthetic, there: that should be below where his actual arm stops, if I remember—’

 

‘ _Should_?’ Bucky cut in. ‘We’re working on _should_? What if you cut _him_ , not the metal?’

 

‘If memory serves, we can get it off below what’s left of his arm,’ Tony returned, defensive. ‘It’s not like I can take an MRI is this fucked up magnetic field to make sure, Buck.’ Bucky turned away, swiping his bare hands over his face.

 

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

 

‘Let’s just _disconnect_ him from the arm; the arm is really fucking in there, but he’s not stuck, not necessarily,’ Tony told the EMT team. Bucky turned back, anxiety ratcheting up when he couldn’t see Steve still breathing, even trapped like they were.

 

‘We can use a plasma torch; there are two in the manufacturing chamber. Then we can, uh. Well.’ Tony hesitated again, glancing at Steve then Bucky. Steve huffed thru his lips, like he was trying to blow the blood out of his mouth and off of his skin. The EMT wiped his chin and mouth with a third piece of gauze. Steve usually stopped bleeding so quickly; Bucky had been down here almost an hour. Steve never bled this long, not since he was sickly and always a week from death. Bucky felt like the worry in his bones would kill him where he stood like a fast-acting cancer.

 

‘What?’ Bucky prompted again.

 

‘Well, I want to force a nonmagnetic panel between him and the drill and then, uh. I want to yank him off the drill,’ Tony said. ‘It’ll get him out of here,’ he added, when Bucky reeled, thinking of how much pain Steve was already in and how bad it would feel to be yanked off of the magnet which had pinning him and tearing at the mag-restraints in his bones.

 

‘ _This_ is the best plan we could come up with?’ Bucky shouted.

 

‘It’s OK,’ Steve whispered. ‘Please, make it stop. I don’t care how. Just make it stop.’

 

‘See?’ Tony said, faux-brightly. ‘It’s all fine.’

 

‘Um,’ Tony added. ‘I’ll, uh, I’ll ask Thor to pull him off, OK?’ he offered. ‘We tried when you were throwing up outside; we’re not gonna be strong enough.’

 

‘I can do it,’ Bucky lied. He couldn’t let Steve get hurt. He certainly couldn’t let someone else hurt Steve.

 

‘No, that’s nightmarish,’ Tony protested. ‘I’ll get Thor to pull him off, and you shouldn’t even watch, OK? ‘cause it’s gonna hurt and it’s gonna be ugly.’

 

‘No, I can—’ Bucky lied again.

 

‘You should know better,’ Steve whispered, reminding Buck. His eyes were closed again. The EMT wiped his nose again, another pad of gauze ruined by the harrowing stream. Bucky bled out right there, like Steve’s words had sliced him apart. He breathed, deep, dead, and numb.

 

‘OK,’ Bucky agreed. ‘OK, call Thor. Get the plasma—saw. Get Steve out of here, and get him out now.’

 

‘Let me take you up, Cap,’ Clint said, and Jesus, Bucky hadn’t even noticed the man join them down here. Clint’s arm landed on his shoulder and dimly Bucky felt himself nod.

 

‘No, I should—I should stay,’ Bucky said, but he didn't sound frantic. He felt frantic, somehow, but he sounded tired.

 

‘Go,’ Steve whispered, almost too quiet for even Bucky to hear.

 

‘Steve’d tell you to fuck right off, pal,’ Clint told him. ‘Come on,’ he added. ‘The Avengers have accommodations at the airport, in an empty baggage loft. We’ll wait for him and Nat to be cleared and we’ll go home, OK?’

 

‘Go,’ Steve whispered again, agreeing with Clint. The EMT wiped his face again and he coughed, pathetic and painful. Bucky wondered if his lungs were bruising. He wondered if Steve would die quicker than the other people tucked down here if the roof gave out because he’d already been pinned and crushed so long.

 

‘OK, I’m going,’ Bucky said. He reached down for Steve, past the EMT and past where Tony had been before scurrying off for a torch and a fireproof blanket, daring to touch his cheek, skin to skin. He felt like a battery had split in his chest and was searing his sternum from within. He could feel the pinch and burn in his throat. ‘I’m going.’

 

 _I love you,_ he wanted to say, so badly. He wished Steve could open his eyes. He knew he’d be able to read it on Bucky’s face if he could, read it in Bucky’s pale face and worry. ‘I'll be waiting.’

 

^^^

 

Steve didn’t know how to explain it, but the void of perception in his arm was heavy. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but the empty signals from whatever processors weren’t crushed by the drill that could still make it to his brain took effort to tune out. It was like the void he felt when someone turned the arm off for maintenance. It had never lasted this long before; he didn’t know what to do. He could feel the static grating at him beneath the ache of his bones, the deep bruises from being yanked against the magnet for so long. He wondered if he’d ached like this as the Soldier, restrained for cryofreeze and maintenance by magnets less than the vibranium drill, if he’d accepted this pain as his baseline, like he’d thought the background pain of the programme itself would never fade away in earnest. He couldn’t think past it, not with the empty space of his crushed arm pressed into him.

 

‘Hm?’ he asked, recognising Bucky’s voice. He looked up from the space he was staring into. For a brief second, before the sound of the engines rushed back in, he wondered where he was. Bucky sat next to him, holding onto the flak strap of his five-point harness. Steve could feel one of his straps resting along the metal paldron. Without the feedback of the rest of the arm—he’d gotten so used to the detailed feedback Tony had given him—the pressure of the strap was intense. Bucky was dusty and tacky with battle grime and old sweat. He looked like blue skies and springtime. He looked beautiful.

 

‘You’re not OK,’ Bucky said, repeating himself or rephrasing a question. He sat at Steve's better side, away from the missing arm, his wrist pressing against Steve’s on the arm rests. Steve hadn’t noticed. He moved his hand, insistently trying to tangle his hand with Bucky’s. The void was so heavy; Steve was going to fall in and float away.

 

‘My arm’s gone,’ Steve said. ‘It’s hard to hear.’

 

‘OK,’ Bucky said, even tho Steve knew he couldn’t be making a lot of sense. Bucky looked away, staring at the same absent place at a thousand yards that Steve had been. The seats left their backs to the fuselage, across the transport’s narrow, fast body from the rest of the team, excusing Thor, who had made his own way back to HQ. The team sprawled, Clint even taking up space on the floor in the centre of the plane, sleeping when Bucky and Steve couldn’t possibly. Nat’s feet were propped on his legs; she and Wanda had pillowed their heads together. Steve knew Bucky would feel shaky and afraid, flying after a mission, especially one gone as far south as this. Steve didn’t know if he would be able to eat without his arm being properly turned off or something, let alone doze over the roar of engines.

 

‘I can’t feel it,’ Steve said, trying to explain, ‘but I can feel that I can’t feel it. It doesn’t, um—It doesn’t hurt, exactly. I don’t—It’s not there, but it doesn’t hurt, exactly.’

 

‘Good,’ Bucky said. ‘Good.’

 

‘Are you OK?’ Steve asked, because he couldn’t tell. Bucky wouldn’t face him and Steve couldn’t really see past the heavy void. He had to keep refocusing his eyes.

 

‘I feel bad just leaving,’ Bucky said. ‘The Sokovians can handle the clean-up, and they don’t want the help; I just—I feel like we’re bailing.’

 

‘They need us to leave to fix things,’ Steve said. ‘We started it. We can’t fix it.’

 

‘Some of us started it,’ Bucky replied.

 

‘But are you OK?’ Steve asked.

 

‘No,’ Bucky said, which was rare and Steve knew immediately was honest. ‘No, I’m done.’

 

‘Done?’ Steve echoed.

 

‘Done,’ Bucky said. ‘I’m done; I can’t do this shit anymore. This wasn’t even people this time; we were _killing_ —it was so much killing and it was only robots—So many people coulda got hurt; so many people coulda—We started it, Steve.’ The hand Steve wasn’t holding rubbed over his eyes. He was shaking, trembling, vibrating as fast as the white noise polluting Steve’s head. ‘I’m gonna collapse; I can’t do it anymore.’

 

‘OK,’ Steve said, even if he didn’t know what Bucky meant. He couldn’t focus past the pressure of the void. He wondered how the arm worked; he wished he’d let Tony explain. He couldn’t ignore the missing signals; he didn’t know how and if he'd let Tony explain maybe he'd know how. His always-present background protocols urged him to ask for maintenance, demanded it. He knew it was on the way; he knew Tony was sleeping now so he could start when they landed. The mainstream prosthetic was in its fifth and final clinical trial; it wouldn’t take long for Tony to make Steve a new arm. Maybe Steve could even figure out how to ignore the void in the meantime. He couldn’t think past the empty sounds. He couldn’t think past the random shooting signals creeping up his neck from the pauldron. He didn’t think he was breathing right.

 

‘Done?’ he asked. Bucky was trying to tell him something. He had to keep it together.

 

‘Yeah,’ Bucky said. ‘HYDRA’s gone. I can’t fight something like that again, or like this again. I’m done, Stevie.’

 

‘OK,’ Steve said. ‘That’s OK.’ He didn’t care. He wanted to go home. He wanted his arm to stop hurting. He didn’t know how to push a word like _home_ past the hole in his head. He didn’t want to lose it.

 

‘Can we go see Peggy?’ Steve asked instead.

 

‘Yeah,’ Bucky promised. He wrapped his arm around Steve, gently avoiding the static-guard sleeve Tony had tucked what was left of Steve’s prosthetic into. HIs hand settled along the line of Steve’s ribs. He felt small under Bucky’s arm; he felt like they were back in Brooklyn in their day, curled up together and safe. Steve wanted to cry with relief. Bucky pulled Steve’s head to settle against his shoulder. ‘Yeah, let’s go home.’

 

^^^

 

‘They need you to lie down,’ Bucky said, prompting Steve. Steve did not look away from the surgical gurney and the two waiting nurses. The surgeon hovered, in her surgical cap but not yet scrubbed in. Bucky turned, inserting himself into Steve’s line of nervous vision. He glanced up for a brief second, meeting Bucky’s eyes before looking back to the nonthreats in front of him.

 

‘They’re going to cut me open,’ Steve said. Bucky nodded, fidgeting. There was nothing he could say to make that untrue or less scary. Steve glanced fleetingly again. ‘I’m gonna be asleep and they’re gonna cut me open.’

 

‘I know it’s scary, but they’ve gotta take the old arm off before they can put a new one on,’ Bucky said. ‘Think of how great it’ll be to have the metal gone. You won’t catch on things, and you’ll be able to have your own skin where you have some of your arm still.’ Steve kept his eye on the surgeon’s hands distrustfully. Bucky didn't think about the scars that peeked out from the edge of the paldron and how much worse they might be on the rest of Steve’s arm, hidden for so long under shifting metal. He didn't think about how heavily Steve’s chest was heaving.

 

‘She did a lot the surgeries for the prosthetics’ trials,’ Bucky reminded Steve. ‘All they’re going to do it get the rest of your old arm off—out.’

 

Bucky didn't know how much they’d have to do. He didn’t know if they would simply have to remove the paldron, or if they’d have to cut him open and pull out his joint or whatever anchoring the metal nerves had that had been so devastating to Steve to lose. Bucky could tell part of the fear Steve felt now was still from the phantom signals from the missing arm. Steve kept having nosebleeds, kept stumbling from the lost weight and the interference of a phantom prosthetic. The surgery would at least lift that scramble from Steve’s thoughts; it would make things easier for him, for them.

 

Steve stood from the exam table, nearly pitching over, forgetting to compensate for the disappeared weight of the arm. Bucky took back the hands that had made to catch him. Steve tried to meet his eyes again, only to skirt them away,

 

‘It’s OK,’ Bucky promised. Steve moved to the gurney but he didn’t try to climb on. His breathing wasn’t whistling, but it was uneven from held-in panic. Bucky wondered how Steve had mustered the courage to have that brain surgery in deprogramming; he had come so far and this prosthetics procedure still scared him almost speechless.

 

‘Yeah,’ Steve agreed, glancing over at Bucky, keeping his gaze down. ‘They’re just going to touch my arm,’ Steve asked, stating it as if to assure himself of the answer.

 

‘They’re just going to touch your arm,’ Bucky agreed.

 

‘Not my head,’ Steve stated again, making sure.

 

‘Not your head,’ Bucky promised. ‘No one’s gonna do anything but fix your arm.’

 

‘OK,’ Steve said, and he hauled himself up onto the gurney. He didn’t lay down, but he swung his legs up onto the mattress. He looked up at Bucky again, managing the gaze for a moment before looking down at his knees.

 

‘She doesn’t even know how to cut your brain,’ Bucky promised. ‘She’s an orthopod, not a brain surgeon. She wouldn’t even know where to start.’

 

‘OK,’ Steve said again.

 

‘You can do this,’ Bucky promised, touching the backs of his fingers to the back of Steve’s wrist. Steve laid down, slowly, and the orderly began wheeling the cart. Bucky followed alongside, keeping his hand against Steve’s. Steve didn’t reach for his hand but Bucky could feel his panic ratcheting upwards as he laid on the surgical gurney, being rolled toward unconsciousness.

 

The gurney stopped in front of two yellow doors, and the nurse looked over to him.

 

‘This is where we go into surgery,’ she said, and Bucky recognised his cue. He lifted his hand from the gurney obediently. Steve sharply inhaled, looking over and up at Bucky.

 

‘You’re not coming?’

 

‘No, I can’t,’ Bucky said. His lashes stuck into triangles. Even if the hospital would let him into the surgery, or if the OR had a gallery, he didn’t think he could watch Steve’s surgery. He’d seen that video of Steve in surgery once and he didn’t think he would stay on his feet for the real thing. ‘I’ll be—I’ll be right here, tho. I’ll be the first thing you see when you wake up; I promise.’

 

‘I have to—alone?’ Steve asked. Bucky opened his mouth and then shut it. He shook his head _no, no, of course not,_ but he couldn’t think of a thing to say. He couldn’t go in. There was nothing else to say to convince Steve he’d be safe; Bucky knew he was right to be suspicious, at the end of any good or bad day. He also didn't know if he could speak without his voice breaking and the weak levees holding back his tears would shatter and he would unman himself.

 

‘No,’ someone said from behind Bucky. He turned. Tony was there, in scrubs and a surgical cap, avoiding Bucky’s eyes even as he held a thin veneer of cheer for Steve. Bucky tried to say hello, break the ice, thank Tony for being strong enough to step up for Steve. He found that the sandpapery lump in his throat was too big to force a proper word around. He cleared it roughly, and reached out to clap Tony’s shoulder. Tony knew him; Tony had to know he was thankful to him and God in equal parts that Steve wasn’t going to be alone.

 

Tony just stiffened. Bucky’s hand retreated.

 

Tony stood like his shoulder was bruised and horrible. Bucky’s palm burned like he’d gripped the end of a hot red tank barrel and wrenched.

 

‘Sorry, I—’ Bucky tired. He cleared his throat again. He couldn’t understand why that hadn’t been OK. They’d been thru bigger things than this, hadn’t they, he and Tony?

 

Hadn’t they?

 

‘Hey, buddy,’ Tony said to Steve, laying a hand on the railing next to where Bucky’s had been. Bucky wanted to step back, create some distance between himself and his first friend, create the dissonant space he felt, but he didn’t so much as turn away.

 

‘Tony,’ Steve nearly gasped. He reached out, desperately taking Tony’s hand. He clung, holding onto Tony even as he glanced up at Bucky again. ‘My God, Tony.’

 

‘Is Bruce coming too?’ Steve asked Tony.

 

‘We, uh, we can’t find him, remember?’ Tony said. Bucky knew Tony didn't mean it as a charge against Bucky’s captainship but it was. He’d lost people after Loki’s first real attack, on the helicarrier, like a greenhorn, like someone who carried their people’s lives lightly, like an idiot. He’d lost Bruce in Sokovia, maybe, or maybe anywhere else. He was realizing he had no way to contact Thor either, just like then.

 

‘Right,’ Steve said, like he was just remembering. ‘After Ultron,’ he added, shifting his grip on Tony. Tony tried to pull away and Steve clung. ‘Please,’ Steve begged.

 

‘Hey, come on,’Tony said. It sounded false to Bucky, but Steve nodded desperately. ‘You’re not alone. I’m coming in to help out.’

 

‘OK,’ Steve accepted. It sounded like the force of his gratefulness was a gale. Bucky had no solutions and he hated himself for it. He hated that he wasn’t enough, that he didn't have anything to make things better, between he and Tony or for Steve right now. Steve looked back to Tony, like he knew Bucky was useless to him now.

 

‘I don’t like it in here,’ Steve told Tony. Bucky wondered how Steve could cry without shame.

 

‘I know, buddy; I know,’ Tony said.

 

Steve begged, ‘Don’t let them cut my head.’

 

‘I won’t,’ Tony said. Some twisted part of him whispered: _even if they leave his head alone, this could kill him; you could lose him today._ He didn't suspect Tony, not really, but he also didn't know if Tony’s promise meant anything, if it could keep Steve safe from a threat if one of these vetted people going into the OR had somehow come in thru a crack.

 

‘Promise,’ Steve demanded. ‘Promise you won’t let them cut my head open. You won’t let them take me.’ Bucky remembered foolhardy sureness in the war: trust in his men, in his Commandos, in Steve and Peggy, in Howard. He didn't feel that now.

 

‘I promise,’ Tony echoed, solemnly.

 

‘Thanks, Tony,’ Bucky tried. It sounded forced and Tony’s smile in response was too. Bucky wished he could be better. He was Captain America; he was supposed to know how to to lead people. He couldn't even lead a pair of apologies so Steve didn't die and come back as a ghost with unfinished business. Bucky stepped back, sensing the surgeon’s impatience.

 

‘OK,’ Steve said, his voice nervous and shaky. ‘OK. OK.’ The orderly pushed and Bucky crossed his arms as the bed with a piece of his heart on it rolled away. Bucky watched them move thru the yellow doors and no one looked back as the doors swung shut behind them.

 

^^^

 

‘It’s weird going out without Sam,’ Steve said. Pepper smiled at him, looking back from the crowds beyond the cafe’s little patio. Steve was watching the people too, watching the people of DC mill about, dozens of unconnected lives.

 

‘You don’t go out. I had to practically drag you to lunch today,’ Pepper said. Steve huffed, bringing his water cup to his lips.

 

‘Happy did drag me out of my apartment; he just had your keys,’ Steve grumbled. ‘Besides, I’m here, aren’t I?’

 

‘You don’t go out enough,’ Pepper amended. He didn’t. She worried about him too; he spent too much time indoors, spent too much time drawing and painting and not enough time trying to make any friends in the new millennium.

 

‘Well, it’s weird. The paparazzi comes out sometimes,’ Steve complained. He tugged at the empty sleeve of his jacket, like he could hide under the drape of the fabric. He hadn’t shown her the results of the arm surgery; she’d thought he would. He’d clung to her in his first few nights in Stark Tower, and on bad days when he’d returned. She thought she’d be shown this like he’d shown her paintings and Bucky’s knitting and the update Tony had done long before. He hoarded the arm now, keeping and pulling the empty sleeve to himself, pulling it tight around what of his arm was left.

 

‘And it’s weird,’ Steve went on. ‘It was a long time I went places with security, always. Usually Sam. I remember going places by myself but the world looked really different then.’

 

‘I like Sam,’ Pepper agreed. ‘He’s back at the VA?’ Steve nodded. Pepper wondered if he were really just people watching or if he was on lookout too. She didn’t see any threats, and maybe Steve didn’t either but had to make sure. She hadn’t people watched with Tony in a long time. They used to make up rude stories about people they saw; now he only watched for threats passing by. He saw them pass by; that was why, she knew, he hoarded himself away like Steve hoarded his stump.

 

‘Must be nice for him,’ she sighed. Steve shot her a glance.

 

‘You sound sad,’ Steve said. She remembered visiting him in deprogramming, when he’d accused her of that for the first time. She’d been floored then that he’d been able to tell. She had to admit it was obvious now.

 

‘No, I’m all right,’ she said nonetheless. It was a dim, constant kind of sad. ‘I just thought Tony would come back to normal after HYDRA was gone, like Sam probably knew he’d go back to normal after your trial—Well, after your crisis wound down. I thought he’d start working on other things again.’

 

‘He does a lot of R and D still,’ Steve offered. ‘He’s been building my arm and he was there when the surgeon removed what was left of my old one. I guess he hasn't been around so much since Ultron.’

 

‘He's pulling away from everything, I think even me. He doesn’t do anything for himself unless its suits,’ she said. ‘Iron Man isn’t him, and I don’t think he can see that anymore, that he doesn’t have to be constantly vigilant to be a good man. I don’t know. He thinks he needs them. He doesn’t need thirty new Iron Man suits; he needs to talk to a shrink, sleep thru the night, and eat more than one meal a day.’

 

‘Oh,’ Steve said.

 

‘He’s still—Yeah,’ Steve said. ‘Bucky doesn’t sleep much either but he’s—He’s working on it. He goes to group again, and we visit Peggy a lot. She always cheers him up. I think he might have a regular shrink. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but he’s doing better, so I’ve been letting him get away with that. Maybe I shouldn’t.’

 

‘Do you sleep much?’ Pepper asked. If Bucky didn’t sleep, if Tony didn’t sleep, and if Steve maybe also wasn’t sleeping, maybe Tony wasn’t as bad off as she worried he might be. Maybe she was the one overreacting, even if she found it hard to imagine a situation where Tony’s behaviour didn’t come from crisis. Steve shrugged.

 

‘Yeah, I sleep a lot, but I need to,’ Steve said. ‘My brain is a piece of shit now and if I don’t sleep enough, it gets worse.’

 

‘Hey,’ Pepper protested on Steve’s behalf. Steve gave her a brief side-eye. She wished she'd known him before the brain injuries; she saw glimpses of her friend sometimes, of a different guy than the one she knew, of someone dry and affectionate, a little dorky when keen on something: glimpses of who he must have been before. She wondered if they felt like bitter reminders or treasured moments or simple memories or even just present moments to Bucky. She saw glimpses of Tony, too, of who he was before Afghanistan. She wondered if Bucky had changed too.

 

‘It is,’ he said. ‘I used to be able to figure out bigger things on my own, make _plans,_   _complicated_ ones. Now the thoughts get stuck. Decisions still hurt, even the little ones. Gets worse when I don’t sleep.’

 

‘So you sleep a lot, but Bucky doesn’t?’ she asked. That didn’t help with her worry; she didn’t know what trauma recovery looked like, with the things the Avengers had seen and had done. Maybe comparing Tony to friends who weren’t genetically human wasn’t a way to get a real baseline.

 

‘Bucky’s got the serum,’ Steve hedged. ‘He feels _better_ when he sleeps every day, but he doesn’t need to, strictly speaking. He can go a long time without, actually.’

 

‘Tony won’t even come out of his workshop at night,’ Pepper said. ‘Bucky will come to bed with you, even if he doesn’t sleep?’

 

‘Usually,’ Steve offered. ‘Sometimes I wake up and he’s reading ‘cause he’s not tired. He used to plan HYDRA strikes when I was asleep; lately, he’s been reading biographies of all the Presidents he missed. It’s better for him.’

 

‘Tony’s not getting better,’ Pepper said. ‘He has no plans to try and I have no idea how to bring it up without it just being a fight.’

 

‘I don’t think Bucky and I really fought,’ Steve said. ‘We don’t yell at each other like we used to. Neither of us could take the stress.’ He laughed, finally looking away from his sightlines to break off a piece of the date square Pepper had plied upon him. ‘Um, but we talked about it and it sucked. It was really hard for me to get those thoughts out of my head, um, to say them out loud. I think Sam helped too; I think he talked to Bucky.’

 

Steve popped the piece of date square in his mouth and squinted at Pepper.

 

‘Bucky’s done, tho,’ he said. ‘He’s baking pies again. He never bakes pies when things are bad. I hadn’t had a pie in so long and he got this bundle of rhubarb from Sam’s sister.’

 

‘Abby,’ Pepper supplied, because Steve still forgot details like that. He probably couldn’t picture her, but could tell you she was a soccer coach, played on the US National Team while Bucky was on ice, he was a prisoner, and Pepper and Tony were seventeen. Pepper remembered watching Abby’s first championship game on her first night out at a college bar.

 

‘I like her,’ Steve said predictably.

 

‘Tony’s renovating a space, trying to recruit people,’ Pepper said.

 

‘Bucky heard about that. He said no, that it was a bad idea, that the Avengers had no place training others to take up mantles we oughta put down,’ Steve told her. Pepper winced. ‘I really thought they were gonna go at it, but Tony just left.’ Pepper was sure Tony had been positive Bucky of all people would understand the threats Tony saw. She didn’t know what to say to Steve now; how could he have known what to say to Bucky?

 

‘Next time I saw Tony was right before the first surgery for the new arm. I was freaking out and he made it better,’ Steve said. ‘Helped me. I believed him when he said he wouldn’t let them cut my brain open; I knew he’d keep me safe. He didn’t even look at Bucky, tho. Didn’t say a word to him, and Bucky was worried for me that day too. Tony didn’t say a word to him.’

 

‘They’re supposed to be peas in a pod,’ Pepper said, because even when Bucky was grieving and fresh out of the ice, he and Tony had got along like a house on fire; it had just been harder to tell.

 

‘Did he ask Nat?’ Steve added, after a moment.

 

‘I don’t know if he has yet,’ Pepper said. ‘I'm sure he's planning to.’

 

‘That’s bad,’ Steve said.

 

‘I know,’ she replied.

 

‘Is that why you’re in DC and he’s in upstate New York?’ Steve asked. ‘It sucks up there. Like, what? He likes trees all of a sudden, just everywhere? Trees? Fuck off.’

 

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Pepper said. ‘I told him how I felt, that I wanted—I _needed_ this to stop, and he said he couldn’t.’

 

‘Bucky stopped,’ Steve told her, almost urgently. ‘He’s done. Tony should be busy laying low, especially after Ultron,’ Steve said. ‘He lied to Bucky. He built a weapon behind people’s backs, even if it had been what he meant.’ Steve shook his head.

 

‘He wants to—He wants to protect the world and he doesn’t know where to stop,’ Steve finished. ‘Howard didn’t either.’

 

‘Doesn’t that scare you?’ Pepper asked. She’d never known Howard. She’d felt like she’d met three different versions of his ghost: one who could let Tony’s brightest moments remind Steve and Bucky of him, the Howard who had been the stern and distant father, and the one who had let the people he’d fought in the war take his friend and his technology.

 

‘Yes,’ Steve said. ‘It scares me a lot.’ Pepper picked at the remnants of her coffee cake.

 

‘I remembered him once, you know, when I was.’ Steve stopped. ‘Howard, I mean.’

 

‘Yeah,’ she agreed, prompting him.

 

He looked down at the table. ‘They'd had to transport me after the kill. I slept in the truck on the way back and they weren’t allowed to let me sleep anymore. They’d figured out it helped—Well, that it would weaken the programming, so they weren’t supposed to, ever. After I slept a while, I knew it was Howard when they got me back to base.’

 

‘The programming was stronger than me, so I had to lie down on the surgical table and when we were alone, I asked him to help me,’ Steve said. ‘He said no. I asked him to tell me something, then, if he couldn't help.’

 

‘What did you want to know?’ Pepper asked.

 

‘If Bucky had survived the war,’ Steve said. ‘I wanted to know if he'd survived it. Howard said no and I just started crying. I didn't know who I was asking about. I just recognised Howard and I wanted to know about Bucky but I didn't remember any of it. It just hurt and I couldn't stop crying. Howard gave me more of the drugs than he was supposed to, to calm me down, make it stop, and he laid his hand over my eyes before I was gone.’

 

‘It was kind,’ Steve said. ‘It was gentle. That's the thing. Howard was doing something evil and Tony has a bad idea, but they're kind, deep down.’

 

‘I'm in love with him and I hate that I can't stay to watch him burn himself down,’ Pepper managed. ‘It kills me.’

 

‘I know,’ Steve said. ‘I can tell.’ He reached out and touched Pepper's hand. ‘You sound sad.’ Pepper held him tightly. He didn't mind her squeeze. He was strong enough to take it.

 

^^^

 

‘You’re sure you don’t want the sleeves?’ Tony asked again, feeling unable to help himself. ‘Not even the one that hooks in at the forearm? It doesn't interrupt the false nerves and it makes some stuff easier. Being inconspicuous in public. Handjobs.’ He turned, brandishing the perfect imitation of Steve’s skintone.

 

Steve shook his head, focused on the one-handed typing exercise testing his new arm’s finer motor skills. The new arm was a hell of a thing. Steve wouldn’t have any feeling along the narrow-printed, study, aluminum-adamantium frame, stronger than the frames Tony made for civilians—but, boy, would he have feeling in the flexible, skin-like blue bioplast that made panels of the rest. The access panel for his meds and the control panel for the bipolar seals was hard and red, but it was tucked away at his upper arm, not visible in most of the things Steve wore. If he’d use the little notches in the frame, attached the sleeve at the shoulder, it’d really look like his own arm to anyone who saw him in a tee shirt.

 

‘I don’t want it to look like my arm,’ Steve said. ‘It’s not my arm. I don’t wanna look down and get confused ‘cause I have two arms.’ Steve seemed pretty grounded these days; Tony didn’t think that would happen. He supposed it wasn’t worth borrowing trouble.

 

‘Fair enough, I guess,’ Tony said. ‘How’s the sensitivity?’ he asked. Steve shook his head, focused on the dexterity test he had clicking away on the desk. Tony knew what the sensation would be like; he personally helped calibrate most of the trial prosthetics they’d been building. He knew how closely to real nerves the brain could interpret the electronic signals from the bioplast and the arm.

 

‘It’s a lot closer to my actual arm than the last one,’ Steve admitted after a pause. ‘It’s so much closer to my other hand.’

 

‘Well, I couldn’t update the integration of your last one, only the receivers,’ Tony said, cutting the explanation of software vs hardware vs hardware one could replace. ‘This puppy’s got all the bells and whistles.’

 

‘It’s not a puppy,’ Steve said. ‘It’s quieter than the last one, too.’ Tony sighed.

 

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s an expression.’ He sighed again. The dexterity test beeped its completion and Tony glanced at the results.

 

‘That’s pretty good,’ Tony said. Steve had managed fifty percent accuracy on the first test, and Tony had tweaked the signal relays in Steve’s forearm. He’d bounced up to sixty seven percent on the second go-round, an improvement far more than what Tony was used to seeing with civilian and veteran prosthetics. ‘Does it still feel slow, or tingly, or does it feel like something you need to get used to?’

 

‘I don’t know,’ Steve replied, running his fingers along the new joints of his hand. ‘It can feel things like it's almost _real_ ,’ he said again. Steve swallowed roughly.

 

‘It’s a good model; I’m proud of it,’ Tony agreed, marking down the new numbers in his notebook. ‘We’ll run the test again when it cycles. Keep, you know, fiddling with stuff. Get the signals firing.’ Steve wheeled his chair a little, leaning, and pulled the Book from its spot on a nearby table. He flipped it open keenly, smiling absently as he touched the velveteen first page.

 

When Tony had been wondering what to get the prosthetics’ trial patients to do in between calibration tests, something uncomplicated that even a ten-percent accuracy hand could do, Steve had suggested a box of soft things, things people would recognize the feel of, could feel with both hands so the brain had an example for the new arm. Steve had looked so wistfully at the Book of Fabrics Tony had made and shown him, touching it only with the tactile, non-textured, flat feedback Tony had known was the limit of the technology in the arm made in the last years of the forties. Now Steve almost looked like he might cry at the feeling of it between new fingers, the texture of the rough sheet of sandpaper Tony had put in too, to diversify the feedback settings.

 

Tony mimicked the rough swallow. ‘How’s, uh—How’s Bucky doing?’

 

‘He’s all right,’ Steve said, flipping from the sandpaper and past the impeccable imitation of rabbit fur. ‘You lied to him and he's pretending he's not, but he's still so angry. We're worried about you.’ Steve hummed a happy sound to himself as he brushed the red, thick corduroy.

 

‘I didn’t lie; we weren't _close_ to an interface,’ Tony snapped.

 

‘Sorry,’ Steve said. ‘It’s not easy to get my brain to talk about stuff like being worried about someone, so I figured I’d just say it. I don’t know how to couch it.’

 

‘Fuck, man,’ Tony said, tossing his pen down. The test beeped its six minute cycle and Steve started the clicking again.

 

‘You built Ultron,’ Steve said after a moment, clicking buttons that coordinated with the prompting screen. ‘Bruce helped build it but he’s fucked off so it’s harder to talk to him about it.’

 

‘Ultron was not what I intended,’ Tony said. Ultron hadn’t worked. He’d been broken, somehow. He’d needed to be fixed; Tony could’ve fixed him if he hadn’t gotten out into the world. He could do better than Ultron; he could create a legacy of peace for the Starks. He could do anything.

 

‘I’m not gonna argue deontological ethics, pal; people _died_ ,’ Steve said. ‘Sokovia’s administrative capital was razed by a fucking _earthquake_ and it could’ve been so much worse. I didn’t intend a lot of things I've done, but I gotta own them.’

 

‘That’s not the same thing,’ Tony said.

 

‘No, it's really not,’ Steve agreed. Tony hated that he was always so _fair_. ‘But you’re—Pepper told me about the New Avengers Facility and you know that’s a bad idea, right?’

 

‘No, it’s preparation,’ Tony said. ‘We can’t sit around and _wait_ when we know what’s out and there. Something is coming for us—’

 

‘Something will always come,’ Steve told him, calm but sure as anything Tony had ever heard. ‘I know something will always come; I’m afraid of it, too.’

 

‘I’m not a coward,’ Tony snapped.

 

‘I’m not saying that. I’m just saying you can’t keep fighting the future, Tony; you’re gonna fall apart. It's peacetime now,’ Steve said, even if that were impossible, a lie. ‘Now is the time to get better and it’s the only time we’re gonna get. A broken shield’s no good to anyone.’

 

‘I’m fine,’ Tony clipped.

 

‘I know what falling apart is,’ Steve offered. ‘I’ve been falling apart forever, but I’m getting to be OK now. I watched Bucky falling apart. I know what it looks like. You’re not sleeping, and you’re not mourning everything that happened and Pepper doesn’t live with you!’

 

‘Do I really gotta explain that you’re not your best right now? Pepper’s _gone_ ,’ Steve went on. ‘I’ve been bad off too, and Bucky was stuck. It’s OK—We—There’re ways to fix being afraid. I’m not afraid anymore.’

 

‘I’m fine,’ Tony said. ‘It’s one thing—Bucky has fought wars, OK, and _you've_ —I was in Afghanistan for _three_ _months_ —’

 

‘That’s a long time,’ Steve said simply.

 

Tony stumbled to a stop. Steve kept his real focus at the dexterity test, not on their conversation; he didn’t see the way he’d floored Tony with that. That small, tossaway validation had felt like fresh air. He couldn’t even tell if Steve knew what he’d said.

 

‘Three months is a long time,’ Steve said again in the silence, as if making sure he'd said it out loud at all. The test finished. He’d improved. Tony gestured for Steve to give him his arm. Steve reached it out. Tony used to hear sometimes the servomotors of the last arm, but this one was silent to him. He wondered if Steve could still hear it.

 

‘I can,’ Steve told him, when he asked. ‘It’s so much better, tho. Really, Tony, thank you; thank you. It’s amazing. It’s everything—it’s really something.’

 

The arm could self-calibrate from the eighty-five percent accuracy mark, responding to Steve’s neurofeedback faster than Tony could possibly hope to ever. In the civilian trials, it usually took a few hours and dexterity games, puzzles, as well as the Book of Fabric, but Steve’s serumed brain, even damaged, was a miracle in itself. Tony pressed the bioplast of Steve’s forearm back under the thin, red frame. It snugged itself into place over the access frame and Steve took his arm back, reverent.

 

‘It’s nothing,’ Tony said, and he sounded too quiet even to his own ears. ‘It’s nothing. Three months is nothing compared to—People fought _wars_ ; I just sold the weapons—’

 

‘Stop,’ Steve sharply said, interrupting. Tony knew what it was for Steve to cut him off in his workshop, especially the trial prosthetics workshop, which really did look like a lab. He fell quiet and let Steve take a breath before speaking. ‘Being captive—being held captive like that is a hell of a fucking thing; I know.’

 

The fact that Steve thought their respective confinements could possibly, possibly be on par was ridiculous. The fact that Steve could sit there, being fitted for a new prosthetic, especially one like this, acting like they were the same: ridiculous. The first surgery had removed the metal outer casing and integration of HYDRA’s weaponized prosthesis; the second had removed his metal humerus so they could _weld_ the new arm’s port into the lateral lip of the bicipital groove of _Steve’s adamantium alloy humerus_ , because his own skeleton had been stolen from him like everything else and replaced with the frame of a weapon. Only the third surgery had given him his arm back, one heavier and far stronger than the civilian models, which—with the forces Steve’s body could exert—couldn’t be detachable and of-optional-wear, even if civilians too had the need for a surgically implanted adapter. He’d done better for those strangers than physiology and his own brain’s inadequacies would let him do for Steve.

 

They weren’t the same. Steve was right; Tony was terrified and if he couldn’t get over himself, he would fail to protect them, save them, save everyone. He wasn’t like Steve. He wasn’t like Bucky. He had to try harder. Tony had _made_ weapons. Even in captivity the only thing he'd built were weapons.

 

They were not the same. Steve was a victim. He'd been a medic, not a soldier, for Christ’s sake; he’d spent his wartime saving lives and he’d gone back into the field after HYDRA began to crumble to keep doing so. Tony was the progenitor of war; Tony had been fueling two sides and profiting off of death. He had probably profited off of Steve's back. They were not the same at all.

 

Steve looked away. He winced as he did. It was paining him to get words out and Tony was selfish enough to wish Steve would stop instead of listening to words issued at such a price.

 

‘And your dad: I don’t think—you didn't know the guy we knew, Bucky and I. You make really different jokes, but you make them at the same time, and because you’re trying to make things brighter,’ Steve said to his knees. ‘You didn't know that guy. You two, I don’t think you ever got to make jokes with your dad. I don’t think you thought it was something he did.’

 

‘And your dad didn't fight with us like you do; he stayed out of war zones mostly, just made weapons. Would come to the front lines to sell and supply.’ Tony had been like that; he'd started off like his father and he needed to make up for that now. He needed to do more, not less. He couldn't stop. Steve had been a prisoner when Tony was doing wrong; he had no idea that every kindness he’d been dealt had been penance too, not just the right thing.

 

‘The war still fucked him up,’ Steve offered. ‘Fucked him up enough you didn't get to know him. Fucked him up so he helped HYDRA.’

 

‘And Ultron was a weapon too, as big as the bombs your dad made,’ Steve said. ‘It unleashed itself on the world too; I don’t think he thought they’d drop it either. He thought it was just a threat. And then people died.’ Tony didn't want to know if Steve meant people had died from his father’s mistakes or his own. Something was coming and it would destroy the world and destroy the Avengers. It would wipe them off the face of the planet and it would be Tony’s fault. He’d be left standing there, like always, to pick up bodies and carry the blame. Steve couldn’t see it and he was trying to talk Tony down when he was the only one guarding them.

 

‘We might have been _safer_ ,’ Tony said desperately. Steve had to understand that, didn't he? ‘We could be _safer_.’

 

‘That’s the same reason Howard built me,’ Steve reminded him, his voice gone so fucking quiet now that he was meeting Tony's eyes. ‘He thought a weapon like me could change the nature of the planet, and keep you safe.’

 

It hadn't kept Tony safe. It had murdered his mom and taken his dad. It had manufactured wars for Tony to profit from and it had taken him so long to see. He wasn't safe. The world wasn't safe. People like him didn't work hard enough to keep others _safe_. It just hadn't worked and the world was paying the price now.

 

‘You thought Ultron could do that too: change the game so it would be rigged in your favour. In favour of peace, maybe.’ Steve looked away again, like he had to. Tony couldn't speak. He didn't know if he was angry or numb. He could hear his breath in his nose and feel himself shaking his head. He didn't know if he was angry or numb.

 

‘But here we are,’ Steve prompted, when Tony couldn't speak. ‘You weren’t safe. Howard was afraid and wanted to make you safer. He failed.’

 

‘This—but I can do this,’ Tony insisted. Steve had to see that. Tony had created the arc reactor. Tony had created the worst killing machines ever seen on this planet and he was going to create the best peace machine if it killed him. He had done amazing things; he was a genius. If he couldn’t figure out how to keep people safe, keep Pepper safe, avenge Steve, avenge the people his weapons had killed in double-backed wars, avenge—if _he_ couldn't do it, _no one could_ and people needed to be _safe—_

 

‘Nobody can carry this much fear alone,’ Steve whispered. His voice was almost like the white noise of a fan against Tony’s panic. He couldn’t believe Steve didn't understand; he couldn’t believe Steve didn't understand that if they weren’t better prepared next time, they would lose. ‘Bucky's so angry and you're so afraid—’

 

‘You’re all set,’ Tony said, cutting him off. Steve's mouth snapped shut and Tony heard his teeth click. He turned away, ignoring the look on Steve’s face. Steve couldn’t even look at him.

 

‘You don't know,’ Tony added. He could tell now: he wasn’t numb; he was angry. He slammed his hands on the screen of his keyboard. ‘You don't know _shit_ , Steve, all right?’

 

‘You don't gotta go alone,’ Steve said. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’

 

‘You’re all set,’ Tony repeated. ‘The arm will calibrate itself on its own from here.’

 

‘Tony—’

 

‘I’m not going to talk about this with you, Little Miss Fucking _Sob Story_ ,’ Tony snapped. ‘If you want to talk about shit like this, go see your fucking shrink.’

 

‘Tony, Pepper’s worried about you and I am too,’ Steve said, like a dog with a righteous bone. Jesus, he and Captain America really were a fucking pair.

 

‘Well, what fucking right do you have to worry about me, huh?’ Tony demanded. ‘You think we should all sit back and _lounge around_ while the enemy plans his next move. You don't have your priorities fucking straight if you don't think you oughta worry about _that_.’

 

‘Of course I worry about that,’ Steve snapped. ‘There’s so many secrets in my head I can’t find; you don’t think _I’m_ worrying about what’s coming for me? That doesn’t mean I stop everything else and _dig_ stuff out of my brain all day, constantly—’

 

‘What the fuck are you even—’

 

‘Getting better is the same as getting ready, Tony,’ Steve told him, insistent enough that Tony heard Bucky’s Captain’s voice in the tone. Part of him wanted to snap to and follow orders. ‘And of course I worry about you,’ Steve added, sounding very much like himself. ‘We’re friends.’

 

‘Maybe we’re not,’ Tony said. ‘You and Bucky are never going to trust me again, not after Ultron—’

 

‘I trust you,’ Steve said. ‘You promised you wouldn’t let them cut my head open, and they had chances three times when they were fixing my arm.’ The arm had only needed fixing because Steve had disarmed Ultron’s final weapon. Earnestly, Steve went on, ‘I knew it’d be OK because you were there. You built my arm, both of them.’

 

‘You trust me because you’re a brain-damaged idiot,’ Tony said. ‘We’re not friends; it’s not the same thing.’ Steve cut his eyes away, sharply.

 

Tony had owed Steve; that was all. He had owed Steve for what his father had done, for saving Bucky’s life, even if they weren’t speaking right now, for everything he was that Tony wasn’t. He owed Steve; he was guilty and he had to fix things to make them better. He could get better if he could just fix things. ‘The arm will calibrate on its own,’ Tony repeated, ‘so we’re done here. Get out.’

 

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine.’ He stood up, tugging his sleeve back down his arm, over the scars of his still-newly exposed shoulder-and-remaining-bicep, over the new bioplast and frame. Steve grabbed his jacket from a worktable and hesitated. Without looking, he took a breath like he was going to say something.

 

‘You can go,’ Tony told him. Steve let out the breath he’d taken; it almost sounded like a scoff.

 

‘I’ll see you around,’ Steve said. Tony resisted the urge to snap: _no, you won’t_. Steve turned to go, to leave, like Pepper had. Tony sat on a work stool as the door closed behind him and felt the anger turn numb again. The computers eventually lit up with screen savers.

 

Tony sat, alone.

 


End file.
